Google amusement

[altivo]

I've heard people complaining just because Google's street views has a photo of their house. How many can say it has a photo of THEM personally? I just found out that the street views of the square over in Woodstock was taken during a farmer's market and has a photo of my mate and his friends performing on the corner. They've been one of the live music groups for the market for several years now. Judging by the location they're in, the photo is about two years old.

To see them, go to Google Maps and ask for "S Johnson St and W Van Buren St, Woodstock IL" then select street view. Let the image focus. You'll be facing north up Johnson St. and they are under the rightmost white pavilion roof on the right hand side of the street (NE corner.) Zoom in once, and look right for a closer view. Now they are centered in the image. You can zoom in again, but the resolution isn't great.

Instead, zoom back out to the original resolution. Put your mouse pointer on the arrow that appears going north up Johnson St. and click once. Now turn right for a better view. Zoom in. Gary has his back to you, wearing red suspenders and a straw hat. His partner Rob from Bear Creek is to his right, wearing a tan vest. Google blurs faces on purpose, but we can also tell that Amy and Neal, who make up the Kishwaukee Ramblers with Gary, are in the image. Neal is facing the camera, with a dark shirt and white t-shirt showing in a "V" around the collar. The small lady on the right, sitting in a chair and listening, is our friend Izetta from up near Hebron. I usually arrive as they are finishing up to have lunch with the group, but it looks as if I wasn't there yet.

Does this mean they've used up their 15 minutes of fame?

[EDIT: Direct link to best image]

Comments

It lasts longer than 15 minutes.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

And even the guy who made the 15 minute quip revised it later, "In fifteen minutes, everyone will be famous."

Re: It lasts longer than 15 minutes.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I never understood that version. But I never understood Warhol either.

[shep-shepherd.livejournal.com]

The Google Maps image of my place clearly shows The Volvo :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I find it amusing that the house I grew up in (mostly) now has a huge tree in the middle of the front lawn. ;p

We are sufficiently obscure for the moment that street views hasn't reached us at all.

[shadow-stallion.livejournal.com]

Heh, that's pretty cool Tivo.

The image of our place is at least a year and a half old as it still shows the 'For Sale' sign in the yard.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Our old house in Chicago is unrecognizable. The buyers gutted it and redid the outside, then sold it for double what they paid. I suspect the current owner is in a bind over both a variable rate mortgage and the city taxes, which were high when we had it.

Where we live now isn't in street views. Too far out, I guess.

[shadow-stallion.livejournal.com]

I find it hard to feel sorry for people that knowingly bit off more than they could chew when it comes to a mortgage. Of course I say that and it could just as easily been me under a bad loan, there was a time and place that I considered a variable rate loan or an interest only loan. *smirks* I didn't consider it very long but it did cross my mind. This was years ago of course.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree. American consumers have been spending way beyond their means for years, decades even. Since (again I say) sometime in the Reagan administration, when credit began to flow like water.

I am truly incensed when now the so-called economic experts tell us that we need to "show confidence" in the economy by borrowing even more and going out and spending it. To hell with that. I have no debts and I intend to keep it that way.

Consumers are very much at fault for this disaster, of course. But the bankers and politicians who promoted and encouraged all that "borrow and spend" mentality are even more at fault. And so far, they are getting off without any punishment, while the rest of us who kept out of the whole thing are being chewed away by the mess they created. Instead, they are screaming for us to pay for the "toxic assets" that they themselves created and bought and sold as if they had any real value.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

I am too uninteresting to be on google maps. :(

And say Hi to Gary :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

At the rate they're moving, they'll get to you. And to us as well, I suppose.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

There are rumors that they are hiring people for the job here in Finland, estimated work time was about two years. I'll try to keep off the street corners for a while... =)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Aww. Here I was hoping for a picture of you. ;p Except they blur pictures of people anyway. Of course if you appeared as a wuffy...

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

I think I'm naturally blurry... maybe that's why I'm always the one who takes all the pictures. ;-)

[soanos.livejournal.com]

I am just generally "bleargh".

Nobody wants to see me so they just subconsciously see a blur.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Dunno, you looked pretty sharp to me the last time I saw you... *noses*

[soanos.livejournal.com]

*meeps the nose*

Yes, about as sharp as a bowling ball.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Now there's something you don't see every day, Chauncy.

What's that?

The striped bowling ball. Pretty sharp, eh?

[soanos.livejournal.com]

*rolls down the alley and into the gutter*

[soanos.livejournal.com]

I wish. I stay indoors 99,99% of the time.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, they're only photographing buildings and streets. If you were actually in the picture, they pixelate you. ;p

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Could I just request my face being replaced with "The Laughing Man" symbol? :)

Like this? http://www.greymalkin.net/images/laughingman_sac.gif

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

That is really entertaining. :)

I cannot understand why people are getting shirty about Google publishing pictures of their home. If I drive down your street *I* can see a picture of youe home too.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have trouble understanding the fuss too. Some are really shrill and intense about it, I've encountered that in person. Like, what difference does it make that someone in Russia can see what your house looks like? But you'd think Google was putting their bank account numbers and all their passwords out there. Or that terrorists from the middle east are looking for houses with green doors so they can come and burn them down. It makes absolutely no sense.

If you don't want people to be able to see your house, you have to put up a tall fence around it, or else live so far out in the woods that they can't get near it (and Google can't find it either.)

[shadow-stallion.livejournal.com]

I think initially people were concerned that it might be a tool for criminals. They would be able to scope out neighborhoods for a good candidate to burglarize. Then there was the bit about being able to see someone in the photo.

Personally I find it to be a very cool tool and highly usefull if you are looking to move somewhere and want to check out a potential home and it's surroundings.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

They blur faces where people are visible. You can see that in the images I referenced. Your daily newspaper doesn't bother with that. I've found myself in the newspaper several times in the past, inadvertently, and without my permission being asked. I just happened to be walking by at the moment when they snapped some photo. Technically, that's not much of an invasion of privacy either, since they didn't publish my name or anything. You walk down a public street, anyone can see you. Wishing it weren't so doesn't make it not true.

Otherwise you have to invalidate all the laws about public exposure, indecency, etc. because the parties involved could just say "We never gave anyone permission to look." ;p

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Well, at least you're inconsistent about privacy issues. :-P

What they do isn't legal in Canada. You might have given up your right to privacy 8 years ago, but the rest of the world isn't going to fall in step with that nonsense.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The street view of your house is public. Anyone can walk by and take a photo of it. This was always true. It's not at all equivalent to the obnoxious intrusions like wiretaps and mail scanning that have been undertaken by the US government in the last eight years. That is wrong, an invasion of privacies guaranteed by the US Constitution, and a violation of legal traditions in the US.

What you show to the public is NOT private, by definition. The street side of a building is a public exposure.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

No, publicly visible isn't public domain, and your definition is incorrect. You should have every expectation to own a property, or make yourself, or something you own, visible to the public without having passing strangers making a profit from it without your OK. Oh, except that that's AOK in the US. Well, I like having that right, and I honestly don't care if anyone thinks it's silly. Different country, different rights.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I think the courts would rule that Google isn't "selling" those photos. So what about satellite views of your house?

What about picture postcards that happen to include your street, or your business, or a distant view of the treetops in your yard?

Maybe Canada somehow thinks that those can be protected, but they've never been protected here. Tour buses that run through Hollywood, pointing out the houses where this or that big name star or director lives? They've been around as long as Hollywood itself.

When they start shooting into the house through the window, or coming onto private property without permission in order to take photos, that's different. I oppose that, and so will the courts.

(I don't know where you got the "eight years ago" thing. )

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Google is a commercial enterprise. People taking their own pictures for their own private collections of photographs is not a commercial enterprise (even if they paid to be on a tour bus to take the photos). If the tour company sold photographs itself, then that would be. If the people on the tour were paparazzi, then that would be. Postcards don't identify the addresses of all the houses that might incidentally be in a scene, and they are never framed centre-on on a private residence, so there is still anonymity. I could go on explaining what wouldn't be possible to do here in Canada, but hopefully you get the picture now, so to speak.

Maybe Canada somehow thinks

Well, there's no Google street view here. So maybe they think so more than just "somehow"?

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

(I don't know where you got the "eight years ago" thing. )

It didn't have to be exactly 8 years, but that seemed a convenient measure. It just seems that one lost freedom inevitably is used to justify losing another freedom. First Google makes satellite and aerial photographs available, but since they are rather low-res and you can't positively identify most houses just from how their roofs look, it isn't so much a loss of privacy as a convenient mapping tool. But then a few years later, they justify the street view by saying that "in this day and age, with satellite and aerial photography, there is no expectation of privacy". Yes, with photos that they themselves made available, they use that to justify making still more photographs available that wouldn't normally be public. And in an environment where certain other rights were taken by the US government, this argument gains even more strength. I don't normally like using the "slippery slope" argument, but this is one case where it has already proven to be very much in effect. So... what's next? What other privacies will no longer be "expected" "in this day and age" a few years hence?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Uh, not quite. There were satellite photos available before that. for example, I acquired this aerial view of our farm, off the web, before there even was a Google I think. It was in 1998, and the service was TerraServer, which I believe was owned by Microsoft. The photos came from Soviet surveillance satellites in this particular case, but they had them from all sorts of sources. So Google wasn't first nor were they solely responsible. In fact, you could get those photos even earlier, but they just weren't on the web. Somewhere we have aerial views of our property in Chicago, prints purchased from a government agency around 1989. I remember being amazed that you could make out the layout of a flowerbed I had in the back yard. (It was shaped like a pentagram.)

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you can see there's a big difference between having to search for or commission a satellite photo that does not have addresses marked on it, and which isn't corrected for perspective vs making everything available just by typing in an address.

But that's not even the issue, so if you don't mind please don't obfuscate it. The issue was the erroneous way that the existence of satellite photos was used to justify the existence of searchable street level photos. As if that was even a logical progression.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually, no. I have trouble understanding the basis of this argument, just as I have had when others brought it up.

All my life I have operated under the assumption that if you don't want something to be publicly visible, you'd jolly well better have it out of the public view completely.

Installing surveillance cameras inside private homes and buildings? Absolutely not. I oppose that sort of notion, of course. Letting the government read your mail or e-mail, or listen to your phone calls? No, again. But public places are and always have been, by definition, public. The public view is the public view, like it or not. If you don't want to be seen, you have to stay hidden. That's my take on it.

As I said to Shadow above, otherwise anyone arrested for public indecency can use as a defense the argument that they never gave anyone permission to look at them. It just doesn't work, to my mind.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

This has remarkably little resemblance to the issue I was discussing.

I guess the main problem with discussing this issue is the lack of any legal framework for the US within which to discuss it. If you don't like the additional rights and freedoms we have in Canada, then *shrugs* it is your loss, I guess. The crux of it for me is that Google can't do this in Canada in the same way that they have done it in the US, and either won't or are unable to do the additional work necessary to make it legal. End of line.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I make no objection to whatever protections you may have in Canada. I just can't picture the legal basis for them in either English or French legal traditions. From a US point of view, it often seems as though Canadians have fewer freedoms than we do here, or at least it did seem that way until the Bush administration came along. It will take years to wipe out the damage done by that single administration, if it can ever be repaired.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I did a search, both web and traditional, on the topic. As far as I can tell, Canada's objection to street views was based on the fact that the photos showed identifiable images of people, not buildings. Google was told that they had to blur or pixelate the faces so that people could not be identified. That was in 2007.

Apparently Google was already in the process of developing that technology, and it seems to have been applied to most of the US images I've seen that have humans in them.

It's true that in the US, courts have upheld Google's right to use images of publicly accessible views. In fact, a very recent case ended just last month involving a wealthy homeowner who sued, claiming that Google invaded his privacy by showing a photo of his house. The court said the same thing I've been saying.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

It is very simple. In Canada, you cannot use publicly accessible views, that identify the location of the premises, or which could be used to ascertain personal information, for profit without permission. Google identifies the addresses, and it is for profit. End of story.

I know there are some web pages referring to this in 2007, but that is largely a red herring. If blurring the faces was the solution, then it would have been solved by now. This is the year 2009, not 2007. Obviously, the requirement to not show faces was only A requirement that was brought up, however it was not the ONLY requirement.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

I'm not upset about the street view, I'm upset they
took the pic while I was working on the house! I had
all this shit piled up in the yard, it looks like
I'm Goodwill Man!

Okay, I /am/ Goodwill man, but I'm usually very neat.

XD

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's like the time my university ID had a photo of me with my tongue sticking out.

[flamekist.livejournal.com]

I'm not urban enough to have a street photo yet. Even the aerial photo is at least 5 years old.

Gary's photo on Bear Creek is nice! He's quite the handsome man you've got there! ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

When he doesn't have that hunted look from being overcommitted again or worrying about the economy, yeah. ;p

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Funny about the 15 minutes of fame... just a moment ago we were talking about that with my brother, when he got on the area news, performing in some opening thingie. Now he got only 14 minutes 57 seconds of fame left. =)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Since Google is available 24/7, I think these guys must have used up more than their share of time.

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

Famous.

So now I've seen a blurry photo of Gary taken by the all-seeing eye of Google.

I've identified my car on the Satellite view...it's always there, behind the building.

Obligatory creepy video

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually the satellite stuff fascinates me. Street Views is just all about massive application of brute force, huge amounts of storage, and people driving around with cameras.

The satellites require real technology and some damned good photographic capabilities. We could count the beehives in our garden and identify a wheelbarrow in the latest view of our place. Even so, we knew what we were looking at. It's a pretty mysterious photo to someone without the inside knowledge to interpret it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, laughed at the video. Had to wait until I was somewhere with broadband to see it. ;p

Unfortunately, that seems to be the extent of some people's understanding.