I couldn’t resist snapping this picture of a car that snaps pictures of us.It seems the long arm of Google has come to town, or more accurately, the all-seeing eye. What you’re looking at is a Google car with a special camera on top, covered up for the day, apparently. I found it parked outside Superstore on 8th Street—even Google needs groceries, I guess.
For those unfamiliar with Google Street View, see the screenshots attached (click for larger view). Basically, it allows you to “walk” virtually down any street they’ve visited. You can turn around 180º, look up at high-rises, into gardens, etc. All you have to do is look up a city in Google, click on Maps, and drag the little yellow guy onto the map.
If the street has been covered, you’ll get a recent (say last year or so) image, one you can move around in. It will show you the address as you do so, so you’ll always know whose house you’re looking at.
Privacy watchdogs have been in a frenzy, but it seems a little late. The map shows parts of the world (in blue) where Google has already been.
This doesn’t include areas being scanned now, like Saskatoon. Google does make concessions to privacy: faces and licence plates are digitally blurred. They’re done so by computer, of course—imagine blurring every face down every road on the planet. As a result, sometimes a face gets missed.
There’s good to be had from Street View. Let us assume, for example, that you are being transferred to a new city. Now, not only can you hunt for houses virtually, you can check out the neighbourhood. Are those car parts on the neighbours’ lawns? Does anyone here mend a fence? Best to try a different neighbourhood—which you can do with a single click. And Google only sees what you would see driving down the street. They stay off private roads.
Still, this seems an extreme project just for the sake of…what? It’s interesting, to be sure. I’ve checked out Manhattan, strolled through Beverly Hills, walked down endless highways in the Australian outback. But it still doesn’t seem worth the enormous effort this must take. An individual more paranoid than I would wonder what they were really doing this for.
That’s likely why there’s been some pushback. A community in Britain, for example, formed a human chain to prevent Google from entering. And now, in Japan, Google is being forced to reshoot it all. The camera was too high, Japan ruled. You can see into people’s private yards.
2 comments:
Hmm, very interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about this - seems useful and novel yet it makes me feel the world is smaller with nothing left to discover on our own.
Smaller indeed...and more so each day, I think.
On the other hand, maybe our feelings toward this are echoed in the misgivings of generations past. The world must also have seemed smaller when we'd sailed completely around it...when we'd mapped out the last continent...when we invented the telephone, radio, etc.
In any case, as the song says, "We ain't seen nothing yet".
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