Google Street View goes nationwide
Coverage of Google Street View, the 360° street-level photography service incorporated into Google Maps, has just been massively extended and now includes images of over 96 percent of the UK’s roads, adding another 210,000 miles of our streets to the 28,000 already available.
Most of the areas already mapped by Street View’s cameras were the areas in and around the major cities; now it’s the turn of our small towns, villages and little-used back roads to step into the limelight.
Predictably, some people are up in arms at the intrusion into their privacy; residents of London Road, a cul-de-sac located outside Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, were miffed that Google’s cameras would allow tech-savvy burglars to see over their walls and prevented the camera car from driving up their road.
The residents thought they had won the battle when “This image is no longer available” appeared for their corner of Bucks yesterday, but the car must have returned when they weren’t looking because pictures of the cul-de-sac were added later that day.
It could have been worse. The city of Windsor, Ontario is asking Google to come back and reshoot their city to show it in a more favourable light; not only were the garbage men on strike at the time, the cameras also picked up a murder scene complete with police cars and bloody bandages.
Privacy issues and murder scenes aside, Street View is an easy to use and fun tool, but it’s very dependent on what can be seen on the day the Google cameras come to visit.
For example, the images above and below are of the same lighthouse monument viewed from different angles on different days. The first shows the monument how it would normally look; the second was taken during refurbishment of the building, and to the uninitiated appears to show a giant Dalek looming above the town.
Expect to see more bizarre images surface as people start to explore the millions of newly available photographs…
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