back to article Cops slap ticket on Street View spycar

You'll enjoy this: Here's evidence that not even the might of Google permits it to park vehicles from its Orwellian Opel spycar fleet in reserved doctor spots: Police dine Street View car for parking in reserved doctor spot Good work there by a vigilant Adam Ranshaw, and indeed the Boys in Blue, who apparently slapped the …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Cops!

    Oh yeah whatever dude. Like nooooo - ughhhhhh! Talk to the hand!

    We have enough words for the filth in this country - please refrain from importing yet more shite here (i.e. bagels, starbucks, Kevin Spacey etc.)

  2. Simon
    Happy

    Shame

    that the Mars image didn't have a shadow on the Google-bot as the sun appears to be in the correct direction to match the shadow on the real bot

  3. Tim Spence

    Simon West's vid

    If you're interested in finding the resulting Street View imaging of those kids on that bike from the video, keep checking:

    http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=chalfont+close,+cambridge&sll=51.537087,-0.912882&sspn=0.009663,0.02738&ie=UTF8&ll=52.188419,0.172847&spn=0.000595,0.001711&t=h&z=20

    Oh, and Simon: stop drinking so much coffee! Or get an anti-shake cam. ;)

  4. Charles Calthrop

    I'd hoped this was going to be an el reg reconstruction. Oh well

    RONSEAL.

  5. Grant
    Thumb Up

    Seen in Newcastle Upon Tyne

    Nearly drove into it, but didn't get a picture (to busy taking evasive action!)

  6. Toytowner
    Stop

    Nicked

    Yep, I can confirm Aberdeen has been Googled. Monday 21st July. Passed my local Nick as I was driving the Panda back there. Gave them a nice friendly grin. Looking forward to the Street View of all the local worthies out and about behaving themselves.

  7. Shawn Nestingen
    Pirate

    Orwellian NeoCon Man-Pigs?

    Seriously?

    In the land of CCTV on every corner what's the big deal with Google mapping stuff? Besides the fact that for each foot of street visually mapped ten children and three hamsters die....this is bad why?

  8. Eleanor Rigby
    Black Helicopters

    that

    child in the video waved at the wrong camera...

  9. Geoff Mackenzie

    Suggestion ...

    How about we all get T-shirts, signs, etc. reading 'Google Sucks!', then see how many such signs accumulate on street view? :)

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Criminal Behaviour

    Definate proof of Google taking pictures of children, where's the police when you need them?

  11. Tom Turck

    Street View

    They have to put the cop writing the ticket in Street View for that spot!

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wide Berth?

    From the Web 0.2 Mashup map thingy it looks like Google are giving Stoke-on-Trent (and Newcastle-under-Lyme, plus surrounding areas) a very wide berth... Probably through fear of their expensive equipment being used for target practice.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Halo

    To Geoff Mackenzie

    Better yet, everyone hold large plackards reading "maps.live.com" and "Scamps, get on yahoo. I need to talk to you about Stu"

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Criminal Behaiour

    You're predicting that Street View is going to become the new refuge for kiddie pr0n?

    Stop the Internet, I want to get off...

  15. Lutin

    Spotted in Belfast

    Google street view car spotted in Belfast on the 15th July. The car was travelling the other way so I didn't get a pic.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Orwellian?!?

    Yeah, cos taking snapshots in public is so, well, evil (if you're a can't think for yourself, Daily Wail reader). /sarcasm off.

    I for one object to people exercising their rights being described as Orwellian. If you want to stir up some aggression, direct it at the spy cameras that really do monitor peoples lives in an instrusive way. They're the ones that should be destroyed if we are ever to return to the Britain our grandparents died for, rather than continuing the march towards the police states of Russia/China/Amerika.

    Voting for Cameron won't make any difference on this subject either.

  17. Stevie

    Fools!

    The third picture, purporting to depict a scene from contemporary Mars, is an obvious photoshopping mashup or whatever the current phrase for a digital collage is today.

    The Phoenix lander would be covered in dust kicked up by it's retro rockets, yet here they are as clean as if someone had been at it with the Pledge only two minutes ago!

    Not only that, everyone (with the possible exception of the Wikipedia author/s who wrote the Phoenix article) knows that "Green Valley, Mars" is filled with grass lawns, gazebos, brass bands, "victorian" style houses and crowds of Idahoans just waiting for evening when they will do something terrible to the google crew. This place looks like the Mojave Desert shot through a sepia filter. Could it be more fake?

    The Google van is obviously in the Utopia Planitia and Google have scrambled a crack team to "fake it" in order to save face.

    When that nice Mr Bush's space marines go there to claim Mars as the 51st state, the truth will come out of course.

  18. bigolslabomeat

    Drove past my window

    In boring old Weybridge. Be interesting to see high-res streetview images when we have such shoddy satellite images for the area!

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    At least they won't do us

    Channel Islands can't even get a decent image from the satelites. And I bet Google won't stump up the rip off costs to boat their car here.

  20. Jesse
    Joke

    RE: @Criminal Behaiour

    "Stop the Internet, I want to get off..."

    Getting off is what the internet is all about!

  21. Stu
    Pirate

    Good work there...

    ..to Adam Ranshaw I mean, managing to take a photo of a bobby without having your cameraphone confiscated and ran into jail for breach of the peace, I mean you are clearly a terrorist on an information gathering mission...

    ...no wait, thats Google.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    You'e mis-interpreted the photo

    The photo is actually of the spy car being confiscated by some PCSOs, who are about to delete its memory before returning it to the driver.

  23. Phil

    RE: I'd hoped this was going to be an el reg reconstruction. Oh well

    Hear hear, where is our weekly action photo dramatisation????

  24. steogede

    Wasting Police Time

    I'd say that the photo shows an officer wasting police time. These Opel's are all registered in Europe; AFAIK the Met has no feasible way of enforcing the ticket when the car is registered outside the UK. I imagine this ticket will go unpaid, like the vast majority of London parking tickets.

  25. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Proof: Life on Mars!

    Well somebeing must have put up a couple of mirrors so the Phoenix land could photograph itself.

  26. Ross Ryles
    Stop

    Re: Seen in Newcastle Upon Tyne

    Damn. I was just thinking they seemed to have missed our part of the land.

    Where abouts was it?

  27. Fluffykins Silver badge

    Ticket on the windscreen form our Boys in Blue.

    Does that make it a blue screen of death?

    OK, it's been a quiet day.

  28. Hollerith
    Unhappy

    illegal for amatuer photographers, but OK for Google

    Given that Google's close-up-and-personal shots could be used by terrorists without raising a sweat, why do the police harass amateur photographers, and professional photographers, while allowing these spycams from Google to roam freely, unless they park illegally?

    Actually, I don't worry about terrorists using Google's stuff, but it's the double-standard that irritates.

  29. BJ

    No Orwell here, move along.

    There's nothing Orwellian about Google and StreetView. In the context of surveillance, I would define Orwellian as, "The arbitrary monitoring of individual citizens by a state." (I tend to view pretty much all monitoring of individuals by a state as arbitrary, and therefore Orwellian, but some might legitimately argue that there are cases where a state should be monitoring individuals.)

    Google is:

    - not a state

    - not monitoring individuals

    Further, a state engaging in Orwellian surveillance would focus on collecting private information and would not share any of the collected data with the general public. The telescreens were in personal living spaces, remember? Or has no one at El Reg read the book?

    Google is not collecting any private data (there's nothing less private than the public street, the timeless cliché for "a palce that is not private") and is sharing the collected data with the public. Indeed, the data is intended for the public. They are providing the world with virtual strolls down streets that one could see in person, where time and resources not limiting factors.

    So, Limeys, please stop your griping and put your upper lip back in the posture we've been told to expect from it.

  30. Paul
    Gates Horns

    panoramio and police ticketing the car

    could the person who got the picture of the cop ticketing the car sign up with panoramio and add their photo to the google map at that location please?

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    OMG!!!

    i been Oggled by Google!!! in norwich!!!

    i hope im not on it, or thier'll be a shit load of complaints in pretty short order!

    who's the lucky bugger with the UK roadtrip...

    i wanted that pukka job (driving the entire UK (with the stereo on 11)) :(

  32. Andraž Levstik

    Nothing wrong

    with taking pics of public places... but I do oppose this being done on such a vast scale... Now what would be interesting is take the pics... digitize them into a virtual world and then have that as streetview...

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Isn't Google just asking for it?

    Couldn't councils impose a Google tax on this sort of thing? I mean lots of what they're filming is paid for by local councils (roads, traffic signs, parks, public buildings, etc.) and I'm sure local taxpayers wouldn't mind a small reduction in their council tax by way of payment for having themselves and their property feature in a money-making scheme for Google.

    Since Goooogle has oooodles of cash, I'm sure councils would be instantly attracted to the idea (they usually have a mafia-like nose for other people's money, so I'm a little surprised they haven't thought of it already). With luck they might then be able to stop milking the rest of the motoring public as much as they do.

    Not sure what the legal basis might be, but maybe you need a licence from someone for conducting a survey? Or perhaps a special parking rate could be introduced for cars with cameras attached? Or a congestion charge of some sort? Councils have lots of powers these days, so I'm sure they could come up with something. I'd have thought that ten grand a day per car would be a reasonable fee.

  34. This post has been deleted by its author

  35. Steen Hive
    Thumb Down

    @BJ

    "Google is:

    - not a state

    - not monitoring individuals"

    -Irrelevant.

    -False.

    In that order.

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @ "@BJ"

    Are you sure they're not monitoring individuals?

    If you have signed up for the service(s), they have access to your mail, IM chats, search history, private documents and goodness knows what else....

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    Stop whinging about Google

    You use one or many of their services multiple times a day, so stop being hypocritical and enjoy the services they provide. They are doing so much more than so many other companies combined and they don't want to charge you a million dollars for it.

  38. Dana W
    Unhappy

    You have got to be kidding,

    "police states of Russia/China/Amerika"

    Sad as this faded republic has become we still have civil liberties modern day England cannot dream of.

    And I don't know if thats a greater insult to you or us.

  39. Sweep

    Spotted in Glasgow

    last Tuesday, the 22nd in Cathcart area. didn't get a pic sorry I was pished.

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    We're already CCTV capital of the World, what's the problem?

    Look out Stu, Scamps is talking about you... on Yahoo!

  41. Francis Offord

    How do they do that????

    Really out of this world Eh?

  42. Jim Lewis
    Happy

    Revenge on cops

    I shopped a copper the other day for parking on double yellow lines while he nipped into a convenience store.

    After speaking to the assistant chief constable I was assured that all officers would be reminded of the importance of them being seen to obey the rules they are so keen to enforce.

  43. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    @Andraž Levstik

    I know of at least one instance of this being done... although the virtual world is not exactly public (yet).

    The project involves the true duplication of some real life structures into a virtual world, and the street view pictures are being used as a quick and dirty method of modeling the nearby structures (to provide a visually effective backdrop - and it is very effective).

    The effort needed to implement this is also quite minimal.

  44. John

    bus lanes too

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2475792/Google-Street-View-car-pulled-over-by-police-for-driving-in-bus-lane.html

  45. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    @ criminal Behaviour.

    "Definate proof of Google taking pictures of children, where's the police when you need them?"

    contery to popular belief, it is NOT against the law to take photographs in a public place, even if that picture does contain children.

    it is also not against the law to take photos of gov. buildings, so long as you are on public property.

    mines the one that's not been spotted yet

  46. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Goldfinger's revenge.

    If they are not careful, they could end up with Odd Job at the wheel at the local car crusher!

  47. BJ
    Thumb Down

    Reserved parking for doctors?

    WTF! The handicapped parking here in the US is already bad enough but you guys have sunk to a new low with that one.

    At least it gives those cameras on every street corning something to watch. "Hey, you there! Yeah, the bloke who just got out of the car parked in the DOCTOR spot. Hold up your General Practitioner license to the camera! What, no license!?!? Stand there and wait while we send someone to write you up."

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like