Comments on: How easy is it to vandalise Street View?

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:06:14 +0000

I’m fairly pissed off with the abundance of all those paranoid people here in this country. I’ve seen myselff on street view but nobody but me is able to recognise the blurred facial image of me. So I find no reason to have it removed.
What really annoys me is that someone on my street has asked Google to remove the street view images of the whole street. These include the ones of my house as the houses on my street are terraced. I’ve now asked Google to put those images of my house back again but until then, so much for the tyranny of the paranoids!! If they don’t I guess I’ll have to take pictures of my house with my own camera and tag them onto Google Earth.

By: Colin

Colin — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 13:59:50 +0000

I just ‘drove’ down Knightsbridge to try and identify the number of some buildings I am doing architectural research on and found several missing. They seem to have got wise to you tho, as turning round still left a blank. V irritating as I’ll now need to make a real trip back there again to cover the errors in my note taking!

Incidentally I have no idea how they join up the images – but if you go to Pimlico Road, London and look at the roads N and S of it you will see where the joins don’t.

By: simbr

simbr — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:08:14 +0000

Dan: I think it has more issues than that – when I looked up my house it had blurred out random sections of brick wall.

By: patrick flanagan

patrick flanagan — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:11:29 +0000

Street view is brilliant. I was in Australia last year and I literally traced my footsteps. As for the privacy if you do not want to get caught going into a sex shop or whatever, put a bag over your head.

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:56:17 +0000

I’ve actually used Street View, though possibly not as Google or the subjects intended – to verify the nature of a postal address which seemed to be at the root of a mail-order fraud problem. Conversely, I’ve found that a very small business sitting in the back room of someone’s house, ho thought it would be a good idea to get themselves a Google listing, turn up on Google Maps when they’re not being searched for.

I think the problem with Google is actually a lot bigger than these isolated incidents suggest; I think they have little or no idea how much privacy people want or need in their everyday lives. There is no word for “variable perception of privacy” and perhaps there should be – I was talking to my accountants about this when they were worrying about privacy of data in financial dealings, and one comment they made was that they had plenty of clients who didn’t even want their wives to know how much money they made in a year…

Then there’s the snobbery problem. Suppose you bid on something trivial on Ebay,and your written postal address is pretty nondescript – but Street View shows you live in a 2 million pound mansion. Is freedom of information doing you any good? Do you have recourse, with Google? Should your insurance premiums change?

By: sjj1805

sjj1805 — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:14:13 +0000

It tickles me when I read some of the complaints about street view.
One item I read on ITV teletext was from someone who said “It will create a field day for the burglers who can look to see if you’re at home!”

So what’s the next complaint from al these privacy champions – a ban on taking our digital camera to the beach?

By: IanB

IanB — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:32:52 +0000

Street view needs a good poking like this. It’s a load of pernicious cobblers and even less useful than SatNav. About humpty tump years ago maps were invented and to get from A to B, are all we need. If you want to see what a place looks like, try Flickr or Panoramio et al and get some quality shots. Street view gives us nothing. If you trust decisions to what you see on there, you’re crackers as its already out of date. It just gives swivel chair tatties and lazy employees yet another opportunity to waste their lives.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:17:46 +0000

Michael: Google does automatically blur all faces. It has issues though. It can’t tell the difference between a pedestrian face, a giant poster with a face, or a carriage horse’s face; and will blur all three equally.

By: Tony Coleby

Tony Coleby — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:54:51 +0000

Well done Barry for highlighting this. An interesting contrast to the Daily Mail brigade’s complaints and fears about Street View.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:06:00 +0000

It was ok what you guys did. I find investigative journalism has to bend the rules a bit to get results. It’s sad enough that there is barely any investigation going on in the world of journalism anymore, especially in the tech business (mostly just rehashing of press releases), so I am glad you guys do this kind of stuff.

As for google: the first thing I thought was: wtf? For ages now they offer the “face” parameter in google image search to find only faces. So why not use that kind of filter on their street view images and blur out all faces or the whole person? Would be better than a black screen for sure!