Few could imagine a more chilling tale of depravity than the story that has emerged over the last few days concerning the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard.
While her alleged kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, has now been revealed to have penned a disturbing blog, some commenters on Boing Boing have uncovered visuals from Google Street View that they believe show him in pursuit of a Google car.
Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin has posted a series of Street View shots in which a van is seen progressing from Garrido's address in Antioch, Calif., toward a Street View car.
At Boing Boing, Jardin gives precise directions on how to follow the van on Street View and believes that its driver may have been suspicious of a Google Volkswagen that was filming for the Street View site. Jardin describes it as "the creepiest thing I've ever seen on Google Street View."
No one viewing this footage when it first went live would ever have considered it suspicious. However, some have pointed out that had police viewed this overhead shot from Google Maps, perhaps it might have made them search Garrido's home with a little more vigor.
The Free Music Archive, an organization created by WFMU, a "freeform" radio station, has officially launched into beta. So far, the site has 5,000 tracks that users can download for free. According to the site's founders, the Free Music Archive is aimed at becoming a repository of tracks, remixes, and music clips for personal consumption. Any of the songs can be added to podcasts, video shows, or a playlist. No licensing fees or royalties will be charged. The organization hopes that through free downloads, more people will buy an artist's full album. Along with a download link, each individual track page has a link to the artist's album page. That page makes the full album available for purchase. The Free Music Archive is live now.
Insurance company Geico has launched a new site to provide visitors with all the information they need about Geico-sponsored car racing teams. Dubbed GeicoGarage, the new site provides access to the company's NASCAR program. It features updated news and photos on all the teams, as well as bios, competition schedules, and downloads.
Enterprise collaboration service Socialtext recently announced that it has raised $4.5 million in a new round of financing that was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Omidyar Networks. The company's founder said in a blog post that he plans to use the funding to improve the product.
Social-banking firm SmartyPig announced Thursday that it has launched a new mobile site. The site will allow users to quickly access account information, as well as view the status of their financial goals. They can also track transaction history and transfer funds from their mobile device. The mobile site is optimized for the iPhone, but the company says that users on Android-based devices will be able to see the site just fine. The SmartyPig mobile site is live now.
A man who didn't want to be photographed for Google Street View turned the tables on the online giant and threatened to take a picture of the Street View vehicle and its driver unless it moved on, the Telegraph is reporting. It didn't, so he started snapping pictures. The driver in the Google vehicle became upset that the photographer was taking pictures of him and shouted to the man to stop taking pictures of him. He then asked for his face to be blurred. Individual faces are also blurred in Google StreetView images.
This story has been updated. See below for details.
Watchdog group Privacy International has filed a formal complaint with the U.K. government over the recent introduction of Google's Street View in Britain.
Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, argues that Street View has caused "clear embarrassment and damage" to many residents of the U.K., according to a BBC News report. The street-level feature of Google Maps, which debuted in the U.K. last week, provides a driver's-eye photographic record of urban landscapes, including storefronts and pedestrians.
The complaint was filed with the Information Commissioner's Office, which confirmed that the documents had been received, but declined to provide any details. Privacy International did not immediately respond to inquiries.
Street View should be "switched off" while the U.K. government investigates the matter, Davies said, according to the BBC. Privacy International is said to cite 200-plus reports of Street View making members of the public identifiable.
The Information Commissioner's Office worked with Google before Street View was launched in the U.K. and said that the Internet giant offered assurances that adequate safeguards would be put into place. In a statement provided Tuesday, the ICO said:
It is Google's responsibility to ensure all vehicle registration marks and faces are satisfactorily blurred. Individuals who feel that an image does identify them (and are unhappy with this) should contact Google direct to get the image removed. Individuals who have raised concerns with Google about their image being included - and who do not think they have received a satisfactory response - can complain to the ICO.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the BBC that the company agrees with privacy concerns. "The way we address it is by allowing people to opt out, literally to take anything we capture that is inappropriate out," he said in the BBC story, "and we do it as quickly as we possibly can."
In February, Google won a lawsuit in a U.S. court over a complaint by a Pittsburgh couple that Street View had violated their privacy.
Update 7:28 a.m. PDT: Privacy International has provided a copy of its filing with the ICO. The gist:
In summary, we believe on the basis of complaints received, that the service has created numerous instances of embarrassment and distress and that the promised privacy safeguards do not provide adequate protection to shield Street View from the general requirement to provide notice prior to collection of the data. We also believe that the technology has created substantial threat to a number of individuals and that the extent of intrusion into the homes of some complainants is unlawful. In such cases, Google should have acquired consent from individuals before images were captured.
Among the complaints cited by Privacy International:
• A woman who has for several years been moving house to avoid detection from a former violent partner complained to us that she felt extreme distress when Street View identified her outside her new home.• Two men working for a large organization were identified by work colleagues in a situation which gave the appearance that they were kissing each other. This was not the case, but the image - subsequently widely circulated throughout the organization - has caused great humiliation to them and their (female) partners.
• A fifteen year-old boy was caught on Street View carrying a skateboard, which his parents had expressly forbade him from using. The boy subsequently had a row with the parents and is now staying with friends.
Google Maps now shows Trafalgar Square in London among other locations.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google has brought its driver's-eye view of the world to more parts of Europe, releasing Street View imagery for the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
As with the United States and other countries that have Street View, not all areas are photographed, but major cities have some coverage. Google Blogoscoped had this list of cities: Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Coventry, Derby, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Scunthorpe, Sheffield, Southampton, and York in England; Belfast in Northern Ireland; Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland; and Cardiff and Swansea in Wales.
For the virtual tourist, Google Maps Mania has a nice gallery of images, too.
Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Citing privacy concerns, a group of Japanese lawyers and professors have asked Google to shut down its Street View feature of Google Maps in the country, according to a Reuters report.
"We strongly suspect that what Google has been doing deeply violates a basic right that humans have," said Yasuhiko Tajima, a professor of constitutional law at Sophia University in Tokyo and head of the Campaign Against Surveillance Society, in an interview with Reuters.
"It is necessary to warn society that an IT (information technology) giant is openly violating privacy rights, which are important rights that the citizens have, through this service," he said.
Google didn't immediately comment on its plans for Japan but directed attention to its Street View privacy site, which says the service respects people's privacy.
"Street View only features photographs taken on public property and the imagery is no different from what a person can readily see or capture walking down the street. Imagery of this kind is available in a wide variety of formats for cities all around the world. We are committed to respecting local laws and norms in each country in which we launch Street View," the page says. "We make it easy for users to ask to have photographs of themselves, their children, their cars or their houses completely removed from the product, even where the images have already been blurred."
The Street View's mascot, Pegman, gets some new prominence for using Street View.
(Credit: Google)Google has given Street View a major new look.
One big change: to activate the Google Maps feature, you drag the "Pegman" character off the top of the zoom slider and drop him where you want to see. It's a lot faster than enabling Street View through a drop-down then clicking where you want to go.
Next, the view itself is larger, filling the whole screen instead of just a window. The higher resolution lets you zoom in more closely. And it works: one trouble spot I use for reference--a dark restaurant sign near my house that I once couldn't read with Street View when trying to give a friend directions--now is visible.
In the lower-right corner of the Street View, there's now a mini-map, and clicking on its upper-left corner zooms the map into a nifty split-screen view with the map below and Street View above.
Well done except for one thing: with either the mini-map or the split screen, the Street View goes black on me when I'm using the latest version of Chrome, 0.4.154.25. (See screenshots below for what it looks like initially and after breaking.) It works fine in Firefox 3.1 beta 1. Is it just me? Comment below if you're seeing problems.
Also, I don't know if this is new, but I just discovered keyboard shortcuts (one of my all-time favorite things). You can pan the view left and right with the A and D keys and tilt up and down with W and S.
For details--and a miniature Pegman gallery that shows various holiday-themed Easter eggs--check Google's Lat-Long blog post from programmer Stephane Lafon and user experience designer Andy Szybalski on Tuesday.
Street View's split screen, when it's working.
(Credit: Google)
Street View's split screen, when it's broken in Chrome.
(Credit: Google)
Earlier this year artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley teamed up with Google to create what might be the oddest thing caught on Street View, Google Maps' virtual man-on-the-street service. Hewlett and Kinsley managed to get a large group of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, locals together to participate in a variety of activities on-camera, including organized jogging, a sword fight, and a parade--complete with band instruments and uniforms. All the while Google's Street View car captured every moment.
The result is a few square blocks of the zaniness that will be forever preserved for others to see--that is, until Google updates the imagery with newer shots. Hewlett and Kinsley have documented the entire project on their site, along with a "making of" documentary that captures the scope of how many people were involved:
What will remain far more interesting to most are all the unintentionally peculiar things caught in Street View's cameras, which continued to be chronicled by eagle-eyed individuals. On that front, worth checking out is StreetViewGallery, which has a Reddit-like system for promoting funny found Street View shots to the top.
[via Google Blogoscoped]
Does Google know judo? Maybe. Google Street View has pulled a sutemi--a judo throw in which you launch yourself at the ground, risking disadvantage, to topple your opponent--on the entire Floating Kingdom. Even though Japan knew that the controversial Google Street View was coming to Japan, the tech savvy country was caught off-guard by Google's willingness to involve itself in yet another privacy imbroglio.
A photo shoot in Japan, captured by Google Street View.
(Credit: Google)The pattern is familiar. Cars mounted with the Google Street View cameras scoot through a neighborhood, taking 360-degree shots of all they surveil. When the feature finally goes live, amused Netizens find images of people in compromising positions, while others decry the end of innocence--uh, privacy.
In Japan earlier this week, the real-world Google Street View effect saw images of two high-school lovebirds playing dentist, a photo shoot in a park, a person collapsed or asleep in a street, the wife of a CEO of a major Internet services company, and the expected shots of couples entering love hotels, which is basically a motel with hourly rates and vibrating beds. The irony of this is that the Japanese are often obsessive about their privacy and ''saving face'' can often be taken literally, where people will cross their arms in a big X in front of their bodies or faces when you threaten an unwanted photograph. When I was living there, I even had a shop owner come out and demand that I not take a photo of the exterior of his trendy shoe store. That's quite a different attitude from what we experience in the U.S., and ironic given the popularity of photography there.
An uncontroversial bird caught in flight by Google Street View in Japan.
(Credit: Google)On message boards, the debate has mirrored that of other countries, from the expected, ''new technology is ruining our way of life,'' to a bear-hugged embrace of finally being able to see what the place you're supposed to be going to looks like. That's no small accomplishment in Tokyo's notorious neighborhoods, where warrens of streets zig, zag, and loop back upon themselves seemingly without logic.
Still, Japanese IT professional Osamu Higuchi was so horrified by Street View that he wrote an open letter to Google explaining how it has acted out of disregard for local standards and could encourage more crime. He called the effects of Street View ''evil.'' Heavy stuff.
Despite being a country with one of the lowest per-capita crime rates anywhere in the world, Japan's media is obsessed with reporting on any change that could lead to an increase. As such, Higuchi's letter isn't surprising. His concerns that laundry left out to dry and car parking spaces revealed in Japan's densely packed and often-empty-during-office-hours residential neighborhoods could lead to higher theft rates are not without some merit, at least in theory.
While it's not as crazy a theory as the Hadron Collider destroying the planet, I've yet to see any reports of increased crime anywhere being linked to Google Street View. Also, as JapanProbe and others have noted, Google has been quick to remove offending images and has been using face-blurring algorithms to try to add a modicum of privacy protection.
Summer may be a time for fireworks and barbecues in America, but halfway across the globe there's some serious bicycling under way. To celebrate the Tour de France as well as the recent inclusion of Street View in France proper, Google has created a custom Street View map for tracking the entire race route at eye level.
Along for the ride are some of the newer Street View additions like face blurring and the ground filling technology that stitches multiple images together to get rid of noticeable seams. According to Google's Lat Long blog, the Street View van is also using a higher-quality camera rig, so the images are coming in a little cleaner than usual.
Sharp-eyed Google Maps users will also notice that the little yellow Street View person is now riding a bike (complete with head protection), although there's no option to fly around like that cool Katsuomi Kobayashi creation we checked out last month. Maybe some enterprising developer can create something fun before the race is over.
Google's previous forays into organized racing events include the 2008 Olympic torch run, which launched back in April. You can track the torch's progress, past and present here.
There's a reason it's called the Tour--there's a lot of biking involved, and now you can see it in Street View.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Google Street View now blurs some faces in Manhattan.
(Credit: Google)BURLINGAME, Calif.--Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant's all-seeing digital camera eye.
The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.
Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog. Ultimately, though, Hanke expects it to be used more broadly.
Dealing with privacy--both legal requirements and social norms--is hard but necessary, Hanke said.
"It's a legitimate issue," he said. He likened the issues some have with Street View to the ones that took place when Google introduced aerial views to Google Maps. It took time for the public, regulators, and Google to get comfortable with the feature, but, "It needs that debate. We see that and try to let it play out."
John Hanke, head of Google Maps and Google Earth, speaks at the Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, Calif.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)
New jurisdictions, new rules
Street View poses other privacy issues besides just faces. Some people aren't eager to have their houses on display, for example. But much of the hubbub seems to have waned since Google launched Street View in May 2007, and indeed other companies such as Blue Dasher are working on similar technology.
Street View presents a view of dozens of United States cities from a driver's perspective (unless a plastic bag is stuck over the Street View camera). It appears Google has begun collecting imagery in Europe as well, along with detailed 3D maps, including Milan, Rome, and Paris.
A Pittsburg couple sued Google for allegedly photographing images on a private drive in April, but it's legal to take photos from public streets in the United States. However, standards vary.
"A just balance needs to be found between what can be publicized, in deference to the principles of freedom of expression and of information, and what has to be safeguarded from excessive public curiosity, so as to avoid infringing the individual's right to privacy and right to his or her picture," the French embassy observes.
Years of research
The face-blurring technology took a year to develop and is based on prior research that took several more years, Hanke said.
Face detection, which humans perform effortlessly with help from some dedicated neurons in the visual cortex, is a decades-old computer science problem. It's finally arriving in basic form in real-world applications, though, including digital cameras that use it to track and properly expose subjects or take a picture only when subjects are smiling.
There are some potential complications for Google Street View, though. False positives that blur billboards or works of art with faces could degrade Street View a bit, but missing some faces that are visible could pose privacy problems.
Google thinks its technology has struck the right technology balance in general.
"It does a good job of figuring that out. It uses a variety of technologies to filter," Hanke said, though it's "not perfect."
Many times computer algorithms struggle to recognize faces that aren't straightforward views. But that problem isn't as bad for Google: the faces that are obscured by hair, telephone poles, or oblique views are likely the ones identifiable already.
Have you found any examples of faces the algorithm missed or that it should have caught? Share the links or other thoughts in the comments section below.
