Google Street View in Elgin
April 2nd, 2008
Google Street View launched about a year ago to a minor flurry of controversy. While the feature is useful, how far are we willing to go? How much privacy do people need? Is it okay to be seen walking out of a certain store or dressed in a certain way or just in other words be caught on camera and put out in front of the world when you’re not expecting it? Should photos of your home be available to anybody who types in your address?
You know these are all interesting questions, and I’d thought Elgin would be able to avoid those questions, because we’re not a huge city, and Google had started their program just with the large cities. But today I noticed that Google Street View has come to Elgin, or at least a part of it, and so the controversy has also arrived.
Is this something that’s good for Elgin? What do you think?
The raod that lead to ny house was on that there and freaked me out!
Posted April 2nd, 2008 at 9:59 pmI recently applied for life insurance and they needed my life story in order to approve me. I could not remember the name of an emergency care place I went to in Lake In The Hills. Google search turned up nothing.
So I went to google street view and “drove” there. Found the street sign by looking out the right hand window….
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&ie=UTF8&om=1&layer=c&ll=42.204998,-88.322353&spn=0.045649,0.172005&z=13&cbll=42.1757,-88.330007&cbp=2,0.43511748532688443,,0,5
Saved me taking a real trip. Amazing really.
As for privacy issues, I think they should honor requests to blur areas certain images. Maybe they could allow people to edit a limited number of frames themselves. I am going to see if my house is in there now :D
Posted April 7th, 2008 at 2:16 pmLooking around on their map there, so far in Elgin they’ve only mapped Randall Road, I-90 and State Street. But they’ve fully mapped Naperville, Aurora and Streamwood, so they either decided Elgin wasn’t worth mapping (hooray?), or they haven’t gotten here yet. Just enough time to mow your lawns, folks!
Posted April 9th, 2008 at 12:35 am