Google Street View

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Uncategorized
• Date: Jun 22,2008

The revolutionary project – which has raised serious privacy fears - already covers more than 50 US cities, and mapping has reportedly taken place in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The internet giant is reluctant to discuss future plans, but its camera cars have been spotted in Italy and Spain this year, and experts believe it is only a matter of time before Street View arrives in Britain.

Street View differs from the popular Google Earth service in that it offers users a close-up perspective of cities as if they are walking along the streets.

The images are obtained from specially-fitted cars that drive along roads taking panoramic 360 degree recordings of everything they find – from customers stepping out of shops, to children playing in front gardens, to couples lounging in parks.

Google Street View: Private moments captured

Google Street View, the eye-level mapping service that lets billions of web users peek into gardens and through front windows, has its sights set on you. The sedan with the Google logo and the mounted periscope cameras was probably trolling area streets in the fall, maybe earlier. The process of capturing thousands of 360-degree images over and over probably took a few weeks, maybe longer. And it almost certainly took several cars, maybe more, over a couple of passes.

Those are the semi-clear details about how and when Google Street View - the latest creation by the Internet juggernaut that allows ground-level views of hundreds of streets, landscapes and attractions across the country - came to the St. Louis region. For Google, the confusion about how and when it puts together Street View is nothing new.

Google has never said how or when it captured the photos for Street View, which first went online in May 2007 and featured only New York City, Miami, San Francisco, Denver and Las Vegas streets.

Google Maps has for years used satellite photos to augment its maps. Although “Street View” is along those lines, the vantage point is not outer space, but up-close and personal at ground level.

Internet users can enter a specific address in the city, click on the “Street View” icon and then see a picture from the exact location. The view can be rotated a full 360 degrees, panned up and down, or moved to another point up or down the street.

So far, around 32 US cities have been photographed by the Street View vans. These mobile units stick strictly to public streets, but that hasn’t stopped the service, which launched in 2007, attracting widespread criticism. One New Yorker, Mary Kalin-Casey, contacted the BoingBoing technology blog to complain that when she Googled her address, a detailed picture of her house popped up, showing her tabby cat standing at the window of her home. “I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes,” she told the site. “I feel like I need to close all my curtains now.”

Even the Pentagon has fallen victim to Google’s long lens. The US military asked Google to remove pictures of the Fort Sam Houston army base in Texas. Photographs of the base taken from the public highway showed the exact position of guards, control points, barriers, and security facilities and posed “a risk to our force protection efforts”, according to a spokesman for the US Northern Command.

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