- Sunday, 12 July 2009
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The longest place name is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturi-pukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu - it's in New Zealand
Google Street View is in more trouble
GOOGLE STREET View is getting into more hot water over privacy matters as its cars drive around the world snapping various things at street level.
Already the service has snapped punters visiting ladies of easy virtue in Thailand and a comatose man sleeping off his grief over a friend's death.
Now it seems to have driven past a burning house on Eagle Point Drive in Sherwood, Arkansas.
After the picture started to show across the world wide wibble Google Maps pulled the picture.
However, as Valleywag pointed out, it is surprising that the drivers in the Google Street View car making the rounds in the area not only kept driving past the burning home, but took the assigned pictures without thinking there might be a few problems. µ
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...the way I read it first it seemed like they were doing nothing about it, but if you look at the picture you see a fire truck already fighting the fire - so where is the problem?

I mean burning houses are part of life and at the moment the car went by the street looked exactly like that.
i easily see the problem, people are worried that once the house is burned down they can no longer figure out the pictures on the street.
The fire truck is already there? As for the comment about taking the photo, wouldn't that be done automatically anyway? I can't see somebody sitting in the car going 'click click' every few metres.
The Thailand photos cannot be credited to Google, but instead to a different, much smaller service called MapJack - www.mapjack.com. 

This is a startup company with obviously much less capital, as cities are slowly added. However, the imagery is incredibly sharp and there is no face/license place blurring. I wonder when they'll be discovered by the privacy advocates living in the few cities they feature?

And then there's 360cities.net. These folks are taking 360-degree panoramas of off-street locations and again, no face blurring.