user's social security number. Experts have warned of the privacy risks faced by the increased merging of online and offline identities. The researchers have also developed an 'augmented reality' mobile app that can display personal data over a person's image captured on a smartphone screen. Since these technologies are widely available, users' future identities may become exposed to anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection. Researchers believe this could force a reconsideration of future attitudes to privacy. Google Street View Google Street View, released in the U.S. in 2007, is currently the subject of an ongoing debate about possible infringement on individual privacy. In an article entitled "Privacy, Reconsidered: New Representations, Data Practices, and the Geoweb", Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski (2011) argue that Google Street View "facilitate[s] identification and disclosure with more immediacy and less abstraction." The medium through which Street View disseminates information, the photograph, is very immediate in the sense that it can potentially provide direct information and evidence about a person's whereabouts, activities, and private property. Moreover, the technology's disclosure of information about a person is less abstract in the sense that, if photographed, a person is represented on Street View in a virtual replication of his or her own real-life appearance. In other words, the technology removes abstractions of a person's appearance or that of his or her personal belongings – there is an immediate disclosure of the person and object, as they visually exist in real life. Although Street View began to blur license plates and people's faces in 2008, the technology is faulty and does not entirely ensure against accidental disclosure of identity and private property. Elwood and Leszczynski note that "many of the concerns leveled at Street View stem from situations where its photograph-like images were treated as definitive evidence of an individual's involvement in particular activities." In one instance, Ruedi Noser, a Swiss politician, barely avoided public scandal when he was photographed in 2009 on Google Street View walking with a woman who was not his wife – the woman was actually his secretary. Similar situations occur when Street View provides high-resolution photographs – and photographs hypothetically offer compelling objective evidence. But as the case of the Swiss politician illustrates, even supposedly compelling photographic evidence is sometimes subject to gross misinterpretation. This example further suggests that Google Street View may provide opportunities for privacy infringement and harassment through public dissemination