Yesterday there was an article at SFGate about one of Google’s latest inventions, Google Street View. Just like it sounds, this new technology lets you travel through selected cities (San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, & Miami) at street level. The images are static, but still the technology sounds a little too invasive for me. A few unlucky people were caught on tape as Google came by to gather footage, some come out looking unglamorous, but others maybe have been caught in something illegal.
The benefits of technology of this kind can include helping us house hunt, learning our way around a city, or just exploring parts of our own city we might have never visited otherwise. Britain is covered in surveillance cameras, (about 1 for every 14 people) and locals seem to have learned to live with them, so why not go ahead with it here? Still, as Morford’s article ends; if this is what Google is going, imagine what the government is up to that we don’t know about yet…
Google street maps needs to be downloaded, and requires flash.