Spain is the fifth country to include Google’s Street View images which launched yesterday. New cities include Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Sevilla. While Google’s plan is to eventually provide street views of the entire world, rumour has it that for the time being we should expect Germany, the UK, Italy and the Netherlands to be included in the near future.
Google Street View is a feature of Google Maps and Google Earth which provides panoramic ground level views and complements the existing bird’s eye view of the maps, allowing users to virtually ‘drive though’ selected cities.
The images are taken by a fleet of modified cars with 360 degree panoramic cameras mounted on their roof which snap the pictures as they drive through towns.
Since its conception, the Google street view feature has generated a myriad of privacy concerns as it has captured members of the public in ‘compromising positions.’ Concerns were also raised about the showing of license plates and the inadvertent filming of private property. Some security experts have warned that street view can even be advantageous to terrorists or criminals (which allegedly led to the delaying of the Washington DC release).
Google has sought to address such issues by implementing face and license plate blurring technology although this has not yet been fully implemented. European cites are released with such blurring already in place, but some in the US complain that despite such efforts, initial images displayed and discussed all over the internet are now preserved for an eternity.
Google Maps scours the web looking for published addresses to add to its database and many if not most companies are now indexed on their maps. An interesting feature would be if that data also merged into the street view interface. A recent and greatly anticipated feature is the inclusion of street view on mobile phones, most notably Google’s Android Operating System, which coupled with GPS or location seeking technology could become a very realistic and novel interface for sat nav display. A version of Street View is already available on Blackberry phones and certain java enabled phones.
If you haven’t already tried Google Street view, it can be accessed in Google Maps. Google currently provides imagery in selected cities in Spain, the US, France, Australia and Japan.
