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Google Street View goes country
WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY SERVICE Google has announced an expanded Street View in Google Maps.
If you thought your life was safe from Google's mobile cameras in country areas, think again. Its Street View operation now extends Google's image acquisition capabilities outside cities to feature rural as well as urban areas.
Street View users can explore street, well, country fence-level imagery in full 360 degree glory all the way from Shetland to Penzance. Google claims the imagery updates 238,000 miles of public roads and will be a boon for local shops and residents by embedding Google Maps into websites.
Ed Parsons, Google's Geospatial Technologist burbled, "Street View takes mapping to a level not possible before. And with so many practical applications its no wonder that over two thirds of people who had tried the service said they would use Street View again."
And what of the privacy issues that have dogged Google since it sent its cameras around UK cities back in March 2009? Not much has changed. Google stated it "has gone to great lengths to safeguard privacy while allowing all British users to benefit from this feature."
In other words, faces and licence plate blurring technology, and users can call Google to have themselves and their properties removed. µ
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I've browsed streetview in the past and they already had it on many rural places for ages, I guess in the west they do the dense cities first though?
Anyway this is hardly an announcement, it's like announcing you will do the second half of the day right after lunch :)
When looking coverage e.g. in Finland, it mostly includes only "country side", since the distances between cities is so big and population density so small. This news probably talks of US?
What comes to privacy, you can think of it like this: If you find a picture that seems infiltrating someones privacy, you should not distribute it. After all, you would not have taken the picture yourself and distributed it in the first place, right?
Google is not effectively distributing *single pictures*, they have countless roads, miles and miles of footage. Sure there are pictures that someone might regard as problematic, but they are lost in the quantity of pictures if they are not distributed.
Regardless of this issue, the pictures are taken in public roads, and surely obeys laws. If some country wants to block Google Street View, they should create law that disallows specific problems. Is the problem in height? Then create law where one is not permitted to take pictures above certain height in roads, etc.
I'm not familiar of why Germans decided to ban Google Street View, but I assume one is still allowed to take pictures in public places... It just doesn't make sense why would the amount of pictures make any difference.
My house and town is now up and in excellent quality. Hooray for zero privacy! lol
They still have a craptacular 2 year old sat image that won't zoom in well still. Google better start hiring people with 4 wheel drive trucks if they want to hit every public road everywhere. Northern Ontario FTW!