Google Maps Streetview

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?

are the google bikes they use for narrow streets motorbikes or bicycles? if it's the latter, they should def send them through the parks.

wtf are those flickr groups

More specifically they're amazing resource for anyone interested in domestic architecture of the twentieth century. Instead of having to buy really really expensive architecture books.

yeah who cares what the people living in those houses might think

are the google bikes they use for narrow streets motorbikes or bicycles? if it's the latter, they should def send them through the parks.

Blurred-out faces of irate (or smug, more likely) members of the Parks Constabulary in every frame.

I have taken pictures of random people's houses and put them on the internet before (like, every fucking time I go on holiday for one thing). I think that's part and parcel of living in an architecturally striking house, you accept that people are going to stop and look at it and take photos for ages.

yeah who cares what the people living in those houses might think

― lex pretend, Friday, March 20, 2009 11:15 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

Well I care and if someone objected I'd take down their photo but I'd also point out to them that it's pretty pointless. You seem to be arguing against a whole history of photography.

lex if you were standing in the window with your willy out then maybe you'd have a point. but there's nothing private about the outside of a house unless you build a big fucking wall around it, always been the case for obvious reasons and google streetview does nothing to change that. Also I'm really worried by the idea that people walking down the public street looking at stuff (with their eyes!) should be arrested! That's the real big brother shit, not this.

By the way Alex you really shouldn't leave your rubbish piled outside like that.

if i could, i would definitely live in a house with a big wall around it

what if people take a photo of that big wall?