Unless you have had your head in the sand you'd know about the Street Viewer option on Google maps.. What do you think about it? are you raged?

Its scary in a way

 

it felt like I was being spied on, but cool none the less

i can do it with a map book

any in Australia yet?

Why would we be angry?

almost all of Wagga was done it was back at Christmas time as the Christmas decorations where up.

Its a waste of time /money..

 

The time spent refreshing for new roads or updates is gonna suck as its all done by human power.

 

Unless some silly millions of people are willing to pay them big money for it.

It is certainly a bit weird. I would say it is bordering right on the edge of breaching peoples privacy.

 

No more sex in public places for me

its weird... I Live on a corner and u can see into my back yard and we were getting new doors put in at the time of the photo...

I think it's neat.

 

They blur it just enough that you can't see faces and plate numbers.

I really can't see the issue with the privacy. Sure someone has photographed your house and that is creepy. In the other hand, anybody can photograph your house, quite legally.

 

You can use it with GPS. Wow my trip to the outer suburbs now cost $10 in petrol and $30 in wireless data transfer. = Progress.

On day Google is going to rule the world.

On what day!!??!?!?!?!!?

We rebuilt our crappy retaining wall with a schmicko boulder wall. Google Street View has a pic of the retaining wall at it's absolute worst, pieces falling off, dirt pouring out onto the footpath.

 

I laughed. My wife was shocked and now hates Google.

I find it more obtrusive then the satellite view, though I wouldn't say enraged or angry. I do think it is tip-toeing on a very fine line of privacy verses information though. It's one thing to be able to have an overhead view into someones yard,and get limited information, and it is another to be able to look at things like distinctive features of the house, access areas, coverage from view.

 

I know I have already looked at other peoples houses, and someone who works with us, has her elderly mother in quite clear view walking down her driveway.

If it were anyone else, they probably would have been charged for stalking by now.

I don't care what anybody else is saying about this - for me, it's f-ing brilliant! Anyone who's worried about breach of privacy - wake the hell up and stop following the American trend of total fear and paranoia. Oh my god - I'm going to die now that someone drove down my street!!!

 

This is simply the coolest thing I've seen in a hell of a long time. I can't tell you how much of a fan of Google I am!! Seriously - model company of the decade!!! If more companies followed their ideals, the world would be a better (and more functional) place.

 

When it was "discovered" that Vista was made with some consultation from the NSA, it was feared that "they" would have a backdoor to your system. Man, if ANYONE wants to go to the extreme lengths to get into my system and spent time monitoring my activities and profiling me - please, go right ahead! I'm one of nearly six BILLION people on the planet! I'm just me!

 

Anyone can see my place from the street, or from Google, or look up the plans from the public access archives with the local council - find out the underground plumbing/wiring/sewer plans for my whole area at the local library. There's a dozen different ways to get info - and to be honest, Google's Street View doesn't add anything to any of that. It was one pass, one random day, and maybe there'll be another in a few years time... whatever.

 

As it is now, it's the coolest thing on the net for a while. Go Google!!

Looks like I don't need to travel the world any more thanks to Google!

 

I can save for some uber computer instead

Anyone can see my place from the street, or from Google, or look up the plans from the public access archives with the local council - find out the underground plumbing/wiring/sewer plans for my whole area at the local library. There's a dozen different ways to get info - and to be honest, Google's Street View doesn't add anything to any of that. It was one pass, one random day, and maybe there'll be another in a few years time... whatever.

 

As it is now, it's the coolest thing on the net for a while. Go Google!!

 

Actually there are two different boats here. Boat one, the local access, which means you have to actually be in the area to retrieve the information, or apply for it usually face to face and give some damn good reason why you would want them.

 

And boat two, the out of area information grab. From any random google street view, I can see:

Tree coverage

Water point

Electricity meter boxes

Front doors

Garage doors

Side Gates

What neighbours will generally be home

How open the street is.

 

Now couple that with the overhead satelite images, and I am pretty damn sure I could **** around with anyones house that I look up. This is dangerous, fun, but dangerous. We are allowing potentially dangerous information to be distributed to everyone willy nilly. It may not at first glance seem harmful, but give that information to someone who has a malace streak a mile wide, and it is Trouble with a capital T.

 

Now I generally love Google, and do think it has great merits, but with this I actually think they are overstepping the line.

If I were to take a random photo of someone on the street, I could potentially be arrested for it, as it can be deemed an invasion of privacy, and doubly so If I were to make it available on a world scale.

Why is Google any different? What gives them a right to go an photograph and pretty much detail a persons property without their consent?

 

Why is it left up to the owner to ask Google to remove it, and not Google to ask the owner for permission first?

 

Seems a little backwards. I for one am leaning towards the Privacy worries.

The pictures are low res so you can't make out peoples faces or number plates etc. so from this stand point it isn't too bad. There is nothing wrong with what they are doing but if they push it much further there will be.

Actually there are two different boats here. Boat one, the local access, which means you have to actually be in the area to retrieve the information, or apply for it usually face to face and give some damn good reason why you would want them.

 

And boat two, the out of area information grab. From any random google street view, I can see:

Tree coverage

Water point

Electricity meter boxes

Front doors

Garage doors

Side Gates

What neighbours will generally be home

How open the street is.

Any sort of time based info would be very unreliable. Google does not release the dates it takes the pictures. These pictures could well be months old, maybe a year old.

Things like whether neighbours are home is impossible to determine without this information. Even if you had it, it would not be reliable.

The other information could be assessed within 30 seconds.

 

If you look at a building how long does it take to tell how many front doors it has? 1 second. In fact you would expect only 1 front door in a house.

 

The electricity gas and water might take a little longer maybe 10 seconds each. That is if it is really important to you. But then I can't see why it would be?

 

If someone is capable of knocking this stuff out, surely they are capable of taking their own picture?

 

Its a illusion of privacy we have. If you walk down the street in the city thousands of people know where you have been. What protects you is that most time they don't care.

 

If you don't want people to see your property, build a fence/wall. The fact that google has a photo of your property online doesn't really hide the fact that your house is on public display.

 

I agree you would not want to push it further.

Actually I wonder when someone will find a house on google that has something funny and it becomes another internet rage. It probably will happen some time. Be interesting to see what happens.

Well my wife and I had a look around a few choice addresses last night.

Its extremely possible that Im in one of the photos of our place, but its a shot from behind and due to the distance/blurriness, we cant be 100% sure. Its very likely its me though, given other factors around I can tell you the picture was taken at 10am on a weekday (bus lane on our side finishes at 10 and my vehicle and one other are parked out front therefore the bus lane has just finished)It makes sense that I was coming back inside after moving our car.

 

Funny thing is, our old vehicle that was written off in March is parked outside my inlaws house in their shot, intact and obviously before the accident, yet out the front of our place is the 'replacement' vehicle.

the photos of my house are over 8 months old - still has the for sale sign out the front.

 

Intersting to have a look at what people have done to other places I've owned.

Any sort of time based info would be very unreliable. Google does not release the dates it takes the pictures. These pictures could well be months old, maybe a year old.

.

 

Um dog, the pictures are taken every second, thats why if you go to a busy street and there are cars driving past, if you refresh it, they'll be further ahead or gone.

 

Major point in case being, I was looking at some street in QLD last night and when i pivoted around there was this what looked to be a group of teens, probably drunk. So i refreshed it, they had moved down the street about 50 meters or so and one of them had fallen over or so it looked.

 

As it currently is, this isn't about invasion of privacy for me, rather that the technology thus far exists... How can we sure this won't be eventually used by certain groups of people to watch every aspect of our lives?

Edited August 6, 200816 yr by hous_bin_farteen

The information is collected easily and quickly via a vehicle that drives along streets. It is wholly automated with GPS etc. Hence the differences in times between some areas and others. Councils use exactly the same automated techniques now to collect road maintanence info for asset mgt.

 

Dunno if realtime cameras are used in some areas as Ice indicated.

 

Just like the Google aerial photos, there is a delay between reality and what is presented. As noted above, this can have undesirable effects - eg if someone was using it to survey a street before they buy a house there...

 

It's been around a while now, but my bet is that it wont last more than a year, once ppl start getting annoyed about it.

Edited August 6, 200816 yr by McCloud