Street View spycar prowls Inverness Hot on the heels of reader Ziad al-Hasso's clocking of Google's Street View spycar in London, Scott MacLeod brings us chilling evidence of the search monolith's ambitions to expose the entire UK to international scrutiny: The Street View spycar spied in Inverness The vehicle in question was snapped around two weeks ago in …
Exactly HOW is it an invasion of privacy to take photos of a street?? I just don't get it. If there is something you don't want people to see, i'd suggest you refrain from doing it in the street, especially in front of cars with bloody great cameras on 6' tripods on the roof!
I mean ANYONE could walk down the street for ANY purpose!!!!
I know they are talking about recognising and smudging peoples faces, but surely with modern hardware one cold fairly easily compare multiple photos while driving along and remove everything that moves? It could build 3D models as well as it goes along too. It wouldn't do anything about the M25 in rush hour but at least it would leave the faces on statues.
The difference between Street View and Closed Circuit TV is that anyone can see the photos google take of a public place but in CCTV only the owners of the CCTV get to see.
It is a public place so what you can see is what you can photograph.
When in public we do what is acceptable in public so there should be no problem with a photograph of it.
However a photograph has a power beyond that of what one person can see. A photograph or video is a record which can be viewed by millions of people who weren't on the street at the time. It can also be looked at live or historically by machine and in ways not yet invented.
Simple phototography and TV has radically changed in a way which changes our lives. A camera is now a far more powerful tool than ever before. Googles street photography will be a powerful tool that will be used for good and evil just as google maps and google earth are.
Just be glad of the techology in your own hands.
It will be like the fun I am having at the moment with Google Earth, which not only shows me sitting in the garden outside my house in Bristol but also my car parked outside my office, as well as outside my mums house in Lanarkshire, Scotland at the same time, all seen from the aerial photography.
But according to the satellite images, I am also capable of time travel, and have retrieved my 1995 Rover 100 (in a distinctive purple colour) from the scrapyard I parked it in 4 years ago and have dumped it outside my ex-missus's house in East Kilbride.
So with StreetView lets see how many places I can be in at the same time again!
Plus.... why did Google buy a fleet of RHD Opels??? Vauxhalls not good enough for them?
I mentioned they were in Inverness last week - what gives ? :P
That aside - my mate snapped one of these devices on a few lamposts in his street that turned up the same day the Google-mobile was about.
http://c.imagehost.org/view/0124/thing.jpg
A quick call to the Highland Council street lighting department confirmed they knew nothing about it, and that it should definitely not have been put there without their permission.
So, over to you, readers. What the hell is it ???
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