A lot has been said about Google StreetView and its impact on people’s privacy. For those of you who haven’t come across it yet, Google StreetView is an enhancement on Google Maps which allows you to look at photos of a particular street and visually walk down it. It’s an awesome feature, especially if, like me, you find it hard to visualise a location from a map; but there’s a lot of debate concerning privacy infringements; particularly that of people who are snapped up as Google drives around taking photos.
Today I came across a video Google have put up which outlines the steps they take to protect people’s privacy; how they scan for artefacts like people’s faces and car number plates and blur them out; and how they respond to people’s requests to remove similar information. It’s a cute video, check it out below:
I find things like Street View really pretty neat.
I remember doing something like it on the Macintosh when I was in the 6th form at school – going around the school, taking photos, scanning them, then making a Hypercard stack for the Mac so you could take a virtual tour. It was sort of inspired by seeing and using the Domesday system at the local library, except at a local level. Of course it was impractical to do anything other than a subset of the school – there was only so much you could get on a floppy disc.
It’s interesting that all the new stuff (like online shopping, Google Maps) had similar concepts in the 80s – the Domesday system was awesome back in the day, and we had some online shopping via Prestel. It’s just in the 80s it was ruinously expensive to do any of this!