Google Maps Streetview

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

people are focusing too much on actual concrete consequences - i'm not arguing that bad things will definitely happen as a result of this, but it instinctively feels intrusive and uncomfortable, and for people with security concerns, it does absolutely nothing for their peace of mind

It's odd that this weirds so many people out considering people have been for several years totally okay with the idea of putting pictures of their face on the internet, with their name attached, for anyone to see, and even with the notion that it's virtually impossible to stop people from doing so in this day and age. But as soon as houses come into it people freak.

There's another argument to be made about sheer saturation of information, one house among hundreds of thousands of others isn't really that interesting, unless you have a special reason to be interested in it. In which case that's either creepy or not depending on your interest and, as Ledge says, if that reason is creepy then whether you can look at that house on the internet is almost irrelevant seeing as you can turn up there in person any time you want.

it's not about houses vs faces - it's an issue of control. putting photos of myself on the internet is an information flow that i'm 99% in charge of - this is something i have no control whatsoever over.

and turning up in person to do creepy shit and loiter around is absolutely not the same thing as being able to study and look closely on the internet. the first will probably get you arrested, for one thing.

it seems so innocuous tho in terms of actual useful stuff it outputs: bcs it is updated so infrequently it doesn't really give stalkers/thiefs all that much useful information (terrorists/etc it gives more useful info perhaps). compared to something like club cards, e.g, and which seem to me much more invasive of privacy, giving tesco/etc a daily account of everything you buy and letting them target you based on that. but again with these and with facebook I'm giving my explicit consent for the info to be shared. I guess I'm giving google tacit consent by not complaining to them?

But if someone wants to take a photo of your house and put it on the internet without your consent they have been able to do so for years. At least with Google it's accountable to them and you can get it removed.

(Someone needs to try that with their house, see how long it takes)

I was gonna say that's still not equivalent but then I remembered that you can upload your own "streetviews" to google maps can't you?

what about people putting photos of you on the internet?

Actually it took about 30 seconds of Googling to find an unauthorised picture taken of my house with information about its exact location. And I assume it's been there for a while.

In attempting to argue with the Lex I've actually succeeded in weirding myself out now.

for stalking purposes, i'd be more worried about ilx before i worry about googlestreetview, to be honest.

What's really annoying about Google Streetview is that it actually restricts itself to streets so there are huge swathes of eg Hampstead Heath that you can't actually see. Including the view from the top of Parliament Hill I think.

i DO worry about ilx

It never phones, it never writes...

clubcards don't seem odd to me. i mean, you know what you're letting yourself in for, there's a specific reward, and tbh i couldn't care less about targeted marketing - it's not like i'm being forced to buy anything

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.

I do exactly what you are describing AND then take photos AND then put them on flickr. As do quite a few weirdo creeps like me...
Modernist houses group on flickr
Post war houses in the UK group on flickr
No-one has ever called the police on any of us as far as I know. Usually people are intrigued that someone is interested in their houses.

many x-posts also there's other gaps like they can't drive down Oxford Street, and other places like in Kings Cross where they'ev just got fed up with one-way systems and miss out streets.

wtf are those flickr groups

apart from anything else that's just fucking impolite

Yeah, because no-one has ever taken photos of houses before. What the hell are you talking about?