An old friend sent me a photo that caused me to stop whatever I was doing. I stared at it for a long time, possibly without drawing breath. Martin and I grew up living next door to each other. He now lives in Australia. It was from there that he sent me a screenshot of Google Maps’ Street View, showing what had been our homes. Side by side, just bricks and mortar obviously, but teeming with meaning for both of us. That wasn’t the thing though. The thing was that in a corner of the photo stood a familiar figure in a red jumper. My dad.
He died this time last year. And yet here he was, standing under the tree next to his car. I felt a lot of things very strongly all at the same time: love, surprise, upset, amusement, anger, pleasure and other things. This was a month ago, but it’s on my mind again this week as it would have been his 87th birthday. And I’m still no nearer computing what I feel about the image being there, available to all, on what my dad always referred to as “the net”.
My first thought was just, well, wow, I suppose. This was followed by annoyance: who gave Google permission to help itself to close-range images of most of our world, without checking if it was OK with us? Is this a literal manifestation of what’s known as surveillance capitalism? Either way, how dare they? It’s far more intimate an image than it feels appropriate for Google to share but, conversely, worse somehow for the fact that his face is so blurred. Too personal yet, at the same time, too impersonal.
It also feels more intrusive for being taken a while back; we got rid of that car five years ago. It’s a small Vauxhall estate – an unremarkable vehicle, which I’d forgotten about until now, when a memory came to me, in a nice way, of how he once described it as: “not a crumpet-catcher, obviously. But gets me about.” Please forgive the unreconstructed language there. He was a) joking and b) well into his 80s. Either way, I’m smiling. So Google’s winning. Surveillance capitalism, 1; me, nil.
I also smiled, as I’m sure he would, to see that it’s him pictured busy doing a chore, rather than my mum. As much as she never stops doing jobs, my dad rarely started one if he could help it. “I am,” he once admitted to me, “inclined to laziness.” But here he is, hard at work, while my mum at that moment is almost certainly nearby sweeping, planting, tidying, cooking, cleaning or whatever. But at the moment Google’s spies happened to crawl by, she was nowhere to be seen. For eternity, as far as “the net” is concerned, he is the industrious one. The injustice of it. He’d be tickled pink.
I’ve enjoyed thinking these things so, in the end, I can’t say I’m unhappy the image exists. After all, I’ve a thousand photographs I could look at to take me to similar places in my mind, but access to them is limited to me, my family and friends. None of them are out there for all to see unless we decide it should be so. But, even with our own photo collections, there is something we’re losing control of: when and where we choose to view them. My iPhone, unbidden, treats me every day to a slideshow of people, places and moments of its choosing.
Most of these people, places and moments I’m happy to be reminded of; others, not so much. Some memories I don’t want stirred, others are so precious and moving that I can’t deal with them assailing me out of the blue when I’m doing something else. To be fair, there’s probably a way of disabling this feature, but I can’t quite bring myself to do so. So, thanks for the memories, Apple, even if I don’t recall asking you to choose them for me.
• Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and Guardian columnist
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