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Posts Tagged ‘street view’

Google’s Street View is already available on all seven continents, providing pedestrian-level vistas of everything from Stonehenge to Antarctica to your own childhood cul-de-sac. Soon, it will be available in some of the planet’s most remote places: The villages of the Amazon rainforest.

Google is documenting the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers, floating the company’s Street View-equipped tricycle atop a riverboat. Local residents will help take some of the pictures, and Google plans to leave some of its equipment in the Amazon so locals can continue doing the work, the company says on its blog.

Workers will pedal the Street View trike down dirt paths in remote Amazon villages, documenting regions that have never even heard of computers, let alone the Internet.

This is all being done in partnership with the Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon, a local non-profit conservation group. Google says the FAS approached the company two years ago and invited representatives to the area. The FAS believes an Amazon Street View (River View?) would help people understand the area on a more intimate level — they’ll see what a village really looks like, and what it would be like to work in an Amazon school.

“It is very important to show the world not only the environment and the way of life of the traditional population, but to sensitize the world to the challenges of climate change, deforestation and combating poverty,” said FAS project leader Gabriel Ribenboim, speaking to the BBC.

Google is starting out with a 30-mile stretch of the Rio Negro River, extending from the Tumbira community near Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas. No word on whether the native populations are worried about their privacy.

[Google Blog via BBC]

Google Art Project has rolled the same tech it employs in its famous Street View cars through 17 famous museums including London’s National Gallery, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, gathering 360-degree navigable imagery that lets users take a virtual walk through some of the world’s great art institutions. Missed the State Tretyakov Gallery last time you were passing through Moscow? No sweat.

The Art Project doesn’t allow you to tour all the museums in their entirety—that’s for paying patrons—but using a pared down Street View car known as “the trolley,” the mapped more than 385 rooms across the 17 galleries, collectively representing thousands of works. Many works have been individually imaged, allowing for a better resolution examination of individual works that allows users to zoom around a canvas.

Moreover, each gallery selected one work to image with extremely high-resolution “gigapixel” tech, allowing users to zoom in on features and details not even visible to the human eye (it’s a very Ferris-Bueller-at-the-Art-Institute-of-Chicago kind of experience). Indulge your cultured side here or check out the visitor's guide below.

[Google Blog]

"Google's cool," privacy not so much

The victims are part of the 3 percent of German residents, totaling almost 250,000 people, who chose to have images of their homes blurred from Google’s Street View map feature. Google uncharacteristically offered Germans the chance to opt out of the system before it launched after German government officials voiced concerns about privacy rights and Google’s data-collection method.

The identity of the person or persons who used Google's tool to track down the spotlight-shunning opters-out and vandalize their uncool homes is unknown.

Google responded: “We respect people’s decision to opt out and by no means consider this to be acceptable behavior.”

[Deutsche Welle]

The drone, made by Microdrones GmbH, can stay in the air for more than an hour, photographing large swaths of territory autonomously as it goes. It can also hover, providing aerial surveillance over a single target area for just as long.

Google's interest in such a drone is most likely its ability to supplement its Google Earth service, which currently relies on aerial and satellite photos to overlay Google Maps with actual bird's eye images of the earth. But Google is in hot water -- particularly in Europe -- for its collection of personal Wi-Fi data by its army of Street View cars that drive around collecting all those street images provided by that service. Street View itself has been called an invasion of privacy because it photographs people without their knowledge or consent.

It's tough to make a case that shooting photos on a public street is an invasion of privacy, but adding an aerial surveillance drone to the mix could stir the ire of privacy advocates and could raise legal issues in some countries as well. Assuming Google is only toying with the idea of raising a drone air force to provide cheap and up-to-date aerial images for Google Earth, this doesn't seem like such a big deal.

But given the fact that Google has a history of prompting privacy complaints and that the drone it acquired was designed with a military/surveillance nature, it will be interesting to see what shakes out of this wrinkle in the Google story. UK aircraft regulations have already been amended to reflect the new and growing role of surveillance drones in society and the FAA is currently considering how the U.S. might integrate commercial drones into American skies. Somewhere out there privacy rights, aviation law, and commercial interests are going to collide, and should Google roll out a fleet of camera-laden drone aircraft, the ensuing reactions of citizens and state could mark the preliminary steps in defining which direction our drone culture is heading.

[Register]

Germany’s data protection chief said he was “horrified” by the discovery – which has been rumored for a while now – and called on Google to delete what he claims was unlawfully collected personal data from wireless networks, as well as to cease cruising German streets for Street View.

What’s a bit baffling about all this is that several other companies have done the exact same thing without catching the backlash Google is currently enduring. Germany’s own Fraunhofer Institute has mapped the WiFi networks in parts of Germany going back as far as 2000 and firms like Skyhook Wireless use their own massive databases of wireless networks (gathered in a similar way) to provide location awareness in many mobile gadgets, including the iPhone and iPad.

Then again, Google is another story altogether. For one, some European nations have already expressed a disdain for the way Google’s tentacles are spreading throughout their cities. Street View has been a particular sticking point for several EU countries, as the idea of a bunch of Yankees cruising about snapping photos of the populace doesn't necessarily sit well with certain governments.

There have been other privacy concerns surrounding Google as well. A few days ago, information czars from a handful of nations including France, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands sent a strongly-worded letter to CEO Eric Schmidt criticizing the irresponsible rollout of Buzz (Canada, Israel and New Zealand also signed). So perhaps it's not so surprising that Germany is taking issue with this.

Further, the massive amount of data Google has at its disposal is enough to make anyone a bit paranoid. While Fraunhofer might be able to tell you how many WiFi networks are in a certain village in Bavaria, Google could – and we’re just speculating of course – associate your network name or MAC, your address, and a picture of your front door. That’s a bit creepy even for the most digitally open among us.

But perhaps the greatest objection is this: What is Google going to do with all that data? The intelligence community would love a means to cross reference MACs with locations and the people who reside there, so the fact that a foreign nation is wandering the streets of Europe gathering this data is understandably disconcerting from a security standpoint. It’s more likely Google wants to use that kind of data for targeted advertising or some such . . . did we say “targeted?” We meant highly-specific advertising. Now, give us the information we want.

[The Register]