It’s hard to believe that Google’s Street View has been in use for over four years. What’s more amazing, perhaps, given the rate at which they have canvassed the world’s streets and alleyways, that there is anywhere left unmapped. But while their teams have successfully traced the surfaces of most large cities and a number of other interesting areas, I suppose it won’t come as a surprise that the remote reaches of the Amazon have not yet been put under the lens.

They aim to change that, however, and have detailed in a blog post their plans to Street-View-ize a large section of the river. It’s being done in collaboration with the Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon, a nonprofit working in the area.

To map the entire length of the Amazon, its tributaries, and distributaries, is the work of years, however, so Google won’t be attempting that just yet (though there are plenty of spots to drop the orange guy if you’re curious). For now, they’re focusing their efforts on a 50km stretch of the Rio Negro starting around Manaus, right about at the center of this image:

They’ll also be going down the dirt paths to small villages with the Street View Trike, mapping all the while, and will set up the tripod they use to show business interiors to give a panoramic taste of village life. And as a little parting shot of charity, they’ll be leaving behind some equipment, probably some cameras and laptops, for FAS and the locals to use. The whole thing is sort of a publicity play for sustainability, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

No word on when the project will be complete — from what I’ve read (travelogues from the 1800s, but still), these kinds of trips generally take longer than expected — but you can see some more pictures of their work over at the Google blog post.

Man, another day, another “Google in privacy uproar” story. I guess my name is Phil Connors. The UK Information Commissioner has said that yes, in fact, Google did commit a “significant breach” of the Data Privacy Act when it collected people’s private information with its Street View vehicles. Great, so what happens now?

Well, Google isn’t expected to pay a fine, or face any sort of punitive action, but the Information Commissioner’s Office (which is “the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals”) will instead audit the company’s “data protection practices.”

But given that Google has sworn repeatedly, and almost every other day at this point, that it will give a once-over to the way its Street View handle themselves, the ICO is basically giving Google a pass here. Maybe not a pass, but it’s threatening to do what Google has said it will already do. So.

Needless to say, this meek action hasn’t been met with rose petals.

An MP said:

The ICO failed to act when it should have done, despite the fact that Google staged a significant infringement of privacy and civil liberties, by harvesting millions of e-mails, wi-fFi addresses, and passwords. Furthermore, the ICO has already proved that it lacks the technical expertise to audit Google’s activity. What confidence can we have in their audit now? People feel powerless.

Nice. Google does something bad (accidentally or otherwise), admits to its mistake, then faces an insignificant punishment.

Fun!

Google may have ended its feud with the Federal Trade Commission, but its standing in Europe isn’t as cut-and-dry. Street View, the mapping service that has caused much consternation, has just gone live in Germany, but in a modified form. So far, the only place where it’s gone live is Oberstaufen in Munich.

Unlike, say, here in the U.S., where Google’s Street View cars can drive around with impunity, the Germans required Google to submit to popular will. Citizens there are able to opt-out of the service long before the cars come a-rumbling through.

Individual citizens can request to have their property blurred when Street View photos go live.

Google said there may still be some bugs in the system—a house that was supposed to be blurred wasn’t, for example—but that they’ll go out of their way to make everything right.

The German Street View is unique in that it’s the only implementation of the service where people can request ahead of time to have their property blurred. In the UK, you can request your property blurred, but only after the images have already gone live.

You can look at the area itself here.

After much hullabaloo, Google and the Federal Trade Commission have kissed and made up. This, only a few days after Google admitted to “accidentally” collecting people’s private data with its Street View cars. Google had promised, in so many words, that it would never do that (collect people’s private data) again, a promise that satisfied the FTC. And, scene.

Google says it will delete any and all data “as soon as possible,” which, I guess, is a victory for the common good.

It will also now require a “privacy design document” for all of its projects. That is, sort of a privacy guidebook to follow to ensure that the project, whatever it is, doesn’t stomp all over its users’ privacy.

If Google Street View and Chatroulette mated and gave birth to a lovechild, it’d look a lot like MapCrunch. For the record, this is not a TechCrunch network site, and would have probably been better off with a name like MapRoulette or StreetviewRoulette or something.

Either way, if you want to be taken to a random location on Google Street View (in North America, Europe, Asia or Australasia), either by clicking a button or automagically after a couple of seconds, MapCrunch is the mash-up place to be.

Granted, it’s a silly little idea and site, but I still find it kind of mesmerizing, at least for a couple of minutes, to watch these random sceneries from all over the world pass by.

Big plus: unlike Chatroulette, chances are pretty thin you’ll see some random dude masturbating every few seconds.

Pro tip: enable the ‘Slideshow’ feature and just lean back.

Update: also check Globe Genie and this one made by StreetViewFunny.

Here’s a quick and dirty screencast I recorded:

There has been strong alarm and also hostility in a lot of European countries against Google taking photos. We have received protests even from local administrations.

Odd that a country so heavily invested in their tourist industry, which consists largely of foreign people taking millions of photos of the country’s most precious possessions, would take issue with the far more systematic and predictable Street View operations. Considering their handling of that other incident, it seems that perhaps the Italian government is simply not equipped to deal progressively with the implications and consequences of the internet and Google in particular.

But I digress. The new regulations require that the Street View vehicles be clearly labeled — in addition to the enormous camera apparatus protruding from the roof, I suppose. Google will also be required to advertise the route its cars are expected to take in both newspaper and radio spots, three days before they embark.

I’d like to say these new regulations are absurd and it’s a public street, etc., but the truth is they’re just implementing basic standards for public, organized shooting events like those we have in place for movies and news reports. Individuals are impossible to regulate, and so the tourism authority doesn’t require you to sign away the rights to your photos or announce your itinerary publicly when you come to Italy. Besides, even if you were to accidentally or purposefully violate someone’s privacy, as you are apparently doing when you take a picture including strangers’ faces, locations, and license plates, these pictures are for personal use only. No sense regulating that.

But in the US, we have plenty of laws governing this kind of large-scale operation: privacy laws pioneered in the early and mid 20th century, governing implied consent, signage, permits, and so on. If you live in LA or New York, you’ve probably seen notices like this or people holding signs saying “Live cameras” near news reporters. Italy has these as well, and seems to simply be classifying Google as more similar to a film studio than an individual, which, as inaccurate as that still is, probably is better than the alternative.

So the issue isn’t so much the regulations, which are fairish and which will necessarily vary from country to country, but rather the way in which the whole issue is being cast. I think it would have been a better approach for the Italian government to make this a friendly agreement rather than demonize Google. By framing it the way they did, with Google the aggressor and the poor Italian citizen the victim, they’re making the debate harder than it has to be. If such an important and influential power as Google is doing things counter to the way Italian privacy authorities would like them to be done, I have no doubt that Google would have met them more than halfway. A joint press conference, explaining the legal limitations on Google and the steps Google takes to cover up your license, face, whale tail, etc., would go a long way toward improving public perceptions of the controversial and (to some) creepy service.

[via SlashGear]

For the longest time Google had denied that its Street View cars had ever captured data—logins, passwords, and the like—from open Wi-Fi access points. Well, it’s now admitted to doing so, saying that such data was “mistakenly collected.” Google says it’s “mortified.”

A brief recap: Google’s Street View cars rumble along the surface of the planet, taking photos for, yes, Street View. Along the way, it was alleged that Google had, mistakenly or otherwise, collected various bits of private data from open, unsecured Wi-Fi access points. This data was primarily alleged to be things like people’s usernames and passwords. I don’t know why you’d be, say, speaking over unsecured FTP on an open Wi-Fi connection, but there you go.

And as you might expect, Google came under fire from the doom-and-gloom crowd, saying things like, “If they’re stealing this information what other information are they stealing?” I just think Google needs to be a little more cognizant of the fact that, for whatever reason, more than a few people out there think it’s The Bad Guy, so it would do well to behave.

So that’s that.

Google has admitted to accidentally collection private data in the UK, but added that it’s “acutely aware that [it has] failed badly.”

Investigations are ongoing, as you might expect.

Google cannot contain its legal problems surrounding the inadvertent collection of personal data from WiFi networks by ots global fleet of Street View cars. Earlier today, police in South Korea raided Google’s offices there to confiscate computers storing data collected from Street View cars in that country. This action follows similar investigations in France, Germany, the UK (where Google was cleared), and a multi-state investigation in the U.S.

Google was preparing to launch Street View in Korea and had deployed a fleet of vehicles equipped with cameras and WiFi-sniffing technology to collect street-level images for Google Maps. The cars use fixed Wifi networks to help determine their location, but these cars have been found to be collecting personal payload data as well. In the past, Google has explained that this data collection was “a mistake” stemming from the inclusion of some experimental code from a previous WiFi project.

Google stated last May that it grounded its Street View fleet once it discovered this problem to strip out the personal data and, presumably, the bad code. It is not clear whether Google forgot to strip the code in Korea, or the Korean authorities are reacting to the news from May and investigating data collected before then. But that one piece of code is proving to be a huge liability for Google.

Photo credit: Flickr/Byrion Smith.

The question now becomes, how much trouble will Google get in for its wanton stealing of private data? You’ll recall that Google was caught collecting data from people’s open Wi-Fi access points, something the company just sorta brushed off. Google shrugged its shoulders and said, “meh, whatever, we didn’t do anything wrong here.” If only the various governments of the world saw it that way. France, fresh off its World Cup farce, says that Google’s Street View vehicles collected people’s passwords as they drove about—not cool, no.

France’s commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés, or CNIL, said that its first go-over of the data revealed all sorts of “data that are normally covered by… banking and medical privacy rules.” E-mail account passwords were among the various data found in the Google-provided logs.

Google said that its cars had “accidentally” collected the data as they were mapping out Street View, something that’s pretty laughable. How does one “accidentally” hop on board an open Wi-Fi access point and then log said data? Unless I’m missing something here…

If you suddenly find yourself with $300 to burn, an old laptop, and too much time on your hands this weekend, I might suggest that you build a DIY Google Street View-style rig for your car. That’s what West Point student Roy Ragsdale did for his “disruptive technologies” class. And if someone at West Point does it, it’s okay for you to do it.

The gear consists of eight Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000 webcams, a couple D-Link USB hubs, a GPS receiver, and an old laptop running Ubuntu. Roy whipped up a script that made each of the cameras take a 1280×1024 snapshot every 20 seconds and then later had each 8-pack of photos stitched together to form a panoramic picture. He was able to grab photos while driving over 60 miles per hour that were “perfectly clear and on par with those available on Google Street View.”

Sounds fun, I guess. Sort of. There’s always the actual Google Street View, too, which involves keeping your $300 and far less driving. Well done for a class project, though.

[IEEE.org via Gizmodo]

Can’t get enough of the Google Street View Trike? Here’s a video of the same, allowing you to bask in the glory of a bike that will steal your privacy as it trundles through your small English town.

To recap this trike is what Google uses when it can’t drive a car through the area its visually mapping. Some dude has to ride this basically 24/7 through weird little cities all over the world in order to fulfill Google’s mission of owning the world.

via Blogoscoped

At any rate, the usual arguments are coming up and Google’s standard defense is in effect. In addition to the thousands of miles of Street View they’ve launched in the UK, they’re also launching the service in the Netherlands and we hear reports of Googlevans in Belgium. Scary and awesome.

Thanks for waiting patiently for this to all pan out over the last year or so, but that Pittsburgh couple that wanted $25,000+ from Google after noticing their home on Google Maps Street View has had their case thrown out of court.

The couple, Aaron and Christine Boring, claimed that the images taken of their home devalued the property and also claimed mental suffering due to the horrific event. While the assertion that Google’s Street View car had driven on the couple’s private driveway in order to obtain the photos is unclear, Google did remove the images once the original lawsuit was filed and pointed out that having photos removed is a relatively simple process.

[via ThePittsburghChannel.com]

Special thanks to the ever-vigilant, eagle-eyed Steve Jabs for sending this one in.

I’ve been cruising around my neighborhood in the updated Street View today and have already found a few interesting items. For instance, as you see above, the stretch of northbound I-5 above Eastlake is now a terrifying corridor of colorful static. I haven’t driven that stretch in a few weeks so I guess it’s possible, but I should have noticed it when I was out there at the Lo-Fi last Saturday.

What other glitches mar the face of the Emerald City?

Gas prices here are fluctuating wildly, as these two pictures from Admiral and 42nd in West Seattle show: just in the time it took the Vehigoogle to cross the street, gas prices jumped more than a buck. What a scam! (yes, I know what’s really going on here)

Lastly, I found the van I was driving this summer parked on 12th in its usual habitat, but unless Google took this picture in a vehicle-mounted funhouse mirror, I’m guessing they’ve got a few aspect ratio issues to smooth out.

Find anything interesting in your recently added town or neighborhood? Glitches, funny occurrences? Feel free to leave them in comments.

The Google Maps for Mobile team pushed a new version of their application today, with two hugely awesome features packed inside.

They’ve added support for Street View, which allows you to get a pedestrian’s-eye view of any street Google has cruised down with their panoramic-shootin’ super car. It’s a feature that has been around for quite some time on the desktop version, but is mounds more useful on-the-go.

The new release also adds walking directions for those of us that count on our kickers to get around. If there’s a sidewalk to walk on, your feet don’t care if a street is one way.

As long as you’ve got a compatible handset (BlackBerry, and most Java-enabled phones), you can nab the new release by pointing it at http://m.google.com/maps

A European Union official has warned Google to play nice with EU privacy laws if and when it launches a European version of Google Maps Street View. The service, which provides street-level photos of certain areas, has generated concern among privacy advocates and home owners. In response, Google will now automatically blur faces of people present in Street View photos.

As it relates to the EU, Google will need to respect the union’s myriad privacy laws or face court cases that will ultimately decide the service’s “success or failure.”

Of course, Google, for its part, said it has every intention of complying with the laws.

Regulation makes the world go ’round.

via Drudge Report

This is definitely one of the funnier things I’ve seen on the entire internet. Hop on over to Google Maps and enjoy a shot-by-shot account of a kid falling off of his bike. It almost seems like the StreetView car scared the hell out of him as it drove by.

I hope the kid’s okay and I’d like to thank him for being hilarious.

Google StreetView via Switched

If previous Google Maps Street View complaints have seemed somewhat frivolous and paranoid, this latest one might be enough to change your mind. The Smoking Gun is reporting that a home not far from the Pittsburgh home Nicholas told us about a few days ago has been thoroughly documented in true Street View form.

More photos and information after the jump.

As the “Street View” images show, a Google vehicle–outfitted with a roof-mounted camera taking 360-degree images–drove down the gravel path and onto the paved driveway leading to the McKee home. The Google car continued past the steps leading to the McKees’s front door and came to a stop outside the house’s three-car garage (and next to the family’s trampoline and portable basketball rim). Taking photos all the time, the Google vehicle was squarely on private property, a fact that presumably should have been apparent when the gravel path became paved. Janet McKee, who was unaware of the “Street View” images until contacted by TSG, said that it was “a little bit creepy to think of someone filming our home without me knowing about it.” She said that the property line began with the paved driveway.

Warning: Google Is In Your Driveway! [Smoking Gun] via Consumerist

Photos taken for the European version of Google Street Views will soon have people’s faces and license plates pixelated out, like so many innocent non-suspects on your favorite episode of COPS.

The same privacy protection may come to the US version as well, although Google has made no formal announcement yet other than to say that it’s "thinking about it." Might as well just do it, Google. Better safe than pantless, am I right?

Google Streetview Airbrushing Their European Edition [TechCrunch]