Google Maps Streetview

Bloody typical - Derby, Nottingham, Coventry...no Leicester...we are truly the Forgotten City.

Amazing quality though - seems better than a lot of the US streetviews - are they using a different camera?

And they seemed to have gone around Birmingham city centre in the dark...

Hull of course is the first and true Forgotten City and we've been left out again here. ( leicester missing is wrong too.)

Scunthorpe though... why? eh?

Oh hey, Oxford streetview!

Which goes no further west than the station, so I can't invite you all to spy on my work. Not that you'd want to.

I accidentally ended up outside my GP's surgery when trying to drag the icon to somewhere a couple of blocks away from it, and am relieved to note that I am not pictured coming out of the door clutching pamphlets about embarrassing conditions or anything.

Daily Mail readers wade in - difficult to tell which ones (if any) are taking the piss...

What an invasion of privacy-google is a cancer and should be obliterated, what happened to our right of privacy, I saw one of these last week parked in a private driveway near Totton College in Southampton am I glad I'm emigrating.

Wow. Just looked at a picture of my house without any cars in the driveway and got a little creeped out. This is what your house looks like when someone's casing the joint!

Fancyapint.com in like Flynn!

I've been caught by the Google street view van TWICE now. The first one seems to be gone now, thank fuck.

link?

The camera seems to be going mental around ledge's place--side-on and close to the google van on both sides it's all distorted, all around the streets in that area

Actually, it's like that all over the UK: software seems to have done a bad job editing out the van.

I think its funny you guys are all "omg this is creepy" - when streetview debuted in Aus last year everyone I knew was completely "OMG THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER LOOK THERES MY HOUSE!" at work and productivity went to zero for about 4 hours.

I'm excited!

Also we don't do any work anyway.

omg this thing is so funking useful!!

I think its funny you guys are all "omg this is creepy" - when streetview debuted in Aus last year everyone I knew was completely "OMG THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER LOOK THERES MY HOUSE!" at work and productivity went to zero for about 4 hours.

Same here--people spent all their time finding pics of workmates roaming the streets and sticking them up on pinboards.

Street view in my suburb ends two blocks from my house. :\

Holy crap, wait, no, they changed it! I can tell this was taken on a Thursday morning, sometime between 8am and noon, because there is recycling waiting to be picked up on my tree lawn, but the trash has been picked up already.

if only SPECTRE in james bond had this tool
http://local.google.co.uk/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Greek+St&daddr=Dean+St+to:Margaret+St&hl=en&geocode=FRYMEgMdxv_9_w;FUIQEgMdqvX9_w;FUYTEgMdVs_9_w&mra=cc&via=1&rtol=0,1,2&dirflg=w&sll=51.513717,-0.134647&sspn=0.004901,0.009656&ie=UTF8&ll=51.514485,-0.135323

sorry wrong link
http://local.google.co.uk/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Greek+St&daddr=Dean+St+to:Margaret+St&hl=en&geocode=FRYMEgMdxv_9_w%3BFUIQEgMdqvX9_w%3BFUYTEgMdVs_9_w&mra=cc&via=1&rtol=0,1,2&dirflg=w&sll=51.513717,-0.134647&sspn=0.004901,0.009656&ie=UTF8&ll=51.503059,-0.126096&spn=0,359.991578&z=17&layer=c&cbll=51.503166,-0.126113&panoid=4m9IGtmq8ZR4YEv3T6IYVw&cbp=12,268.726035518684,,1,4.667583055269528

if anything i think the widespread acceptance, even excitement, is more disturbing than the actual photos - i don't assume my flat will be burgled or that i'll be stalked b/c of it (though if i'd had stalker problems ever i'd be petrified about it) - it just transgresses a basic expectation of privacy for me. ok, any random lunatic could take pictures of my flat and put them on flickr or whatever, but that would still be indefensibly creepy, and this just makes the creepiness so much more official. it's awful.

people can walk down your road

http://neoshinka.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/lost_highway_robert_blake_video_camera_400.jpg

People taking pictures of your flat would only be creepy if they are doing it because they wanted to take a picture of your flat for no reason (or for personal reasons to you)?

Pancakes Hackman, why does your neighbourhood hate front fences?

Beats me! They're not very common in this entire suburb.

A lot of the families here are Orthodox Jewish, and have tons of kids who all run around through each other's yards, so maybe that's part of it? We're going to put up a small fence or hedge, though.

How about some piano wire six inches off the ground?

yah its not like all the houses are tagged with who lives there. it's just streetscapes right? no different to driving down to high st to see what it looks like

I'm looking for a new flat at the moment and am finding this thing very helpful

stfu creep

All the orthodox jews in my neighbourhood must have complained to google, because within weeks of my area going up on streetview, large chunks of the surrounding streets disappeared again. Not whole streets - just bits, 2-5 properties wide.

It then occurred to me each was where a temple or jewish high school was.

I dont understand the paranoia, but eh *shrug*. Its not like the places arent blazingly obviously jewish temples/schools when you pass them on the road!

They snapped my place on trash day too.

Makes it look like there's always trash in front of my house :(

- can you seriously not work out why jewish bodies might not want detailed pictures of their institutions, locations and environs on the internet
- do you seriously think that people being able to walk down your street on is the same level of intrusion as this

I don't see how someone looking at a static picture of my house counts as intrusion.

not seeing the big deal here.

i mean the problem. the application itself is kind of woah.

Dont get me wrong, I know exactly why they'd want to be removed. I just think it's a bit uneccesary - these are very visibly jewish institutions with signage and gates and banners and its not like theyre area 51 or something. Still, I dunno.

Also a picture of a house on an indeterminate date months ago. Aren't churches/synagogues/places of worship marked on maps anyway? Now you can see a picture and see that the big churchy-looking building at the address of a church is actually a church after all.

next thing you know they'll be publishing books with people's names addresses and phone numbers in.

They took the picture of my house well over a year ago cos the front yard isn't covered in rubbish and weeds, it looks all neat and tidy. I gave up trying to clean it up a long time ago, it was a losing battle.

will never happen

if you saw someone outside your flat staring at and studying the building - not in a casual, walking-past way, but loitering and looking closely & carefully - would you not be creeped out and discomfited? if i saw that i'd be calling the fucking police. if someone physically did that there's a reasonable expectation that someone would see them, but the thing with google street view is that anyone can do this without you knowing.

apparently there was some furore when this was rolled out in japan - cis sent me links to the debate here and here - cut through the "cultural divisions" argument and plenty of the points are massively otm

also you may not necessarily have had problems with stalkers, or wanted to keep certain people from knowing too much about where you live or work, but it should seem obvious that plenty of people do have to think about such issues.

does anyone know how often the streetviews are updated?

i looked at my old houses and have no idea when they were taken, if i was living there at the time or not. there were some blurred-face people around, but pretty sure none were me.

surely the whole point of stalking is you have some idea of the stalkee before stalking them? ie not randomly scrolling through streetviews and looking out for blurred-face people... idk, maybe even stalkers are aspie shut-ins these days. but the odds of someone finding out where you live or work from streetviews have got to be pretty small.

If my stalker doesn't know where I live, no problem. If the stalker knows or can find out where I live, that's a problem regardless of streetview. Don't see how this enables anything.

Maybe if you leave your key in view through the window...

http://vision.ucsd.edu/~blaxton/pagePapers/laxton_wang_savage_ccs2008.pdf
"Using modest imaging equipment and standard computer vision al-
gorithms, we demonstrate the effectiveness of physical key teledu-
plication — extracting a key’s complete and precise bitting code at
a distance via optical decoding and then cutting precise duplicates"

- if they ever bring out a super-hi-rez version.

Who fancies playing the BNP members streetview game then?

they're updated every two to three years apparently. if you don't want your house featured, you can have it obscured. police are happy with it. information commissioner is happy with it. whiners stfu.

thanks for links lex, those were interesting

says he in his cator estate ivory tower xxp