Google Is Watching Us!

Remembered how worried you were that Google was collecting your search habits and invading your privacy? You can drop that worry now, because I have a whole new Big Brother concern for you to grapple with. Google is taking 360-degree images of major cities across the US and tying them together with its increasingly popular Google Maps service, and in some of the photos, you can make out faces, license plates, and more.

Now you can start worrying. When I first heard about this, I dismissed the concern. Amazon's A9 search engine started documenting street corners and intersections in major cities over a year ago. So I could virtually stand at the intersection of 28th and Madison and see my building and all the adjacent ones as well. There were people in these images, too, but I couldn't make out any of them. Google maps, however, is a different story—well, a partially different story. I actually love the service because you can start out with a global or nation-wide view and zoom all the way down to the street address of your choice. At each level you get a new, and useful, view. You can see simple maps, complex maps, street and highway info, satellite imagery and local business information. It, like Yahoo Local and MSN Virtual Earth, is a powerful, free service.

I decided to check out the street view and see if things are really as bad as people say. I started by using an area I know well—New York City. This is one of a handful of cities currently covered (though not 100 percent) by Street View. I virtually walked down Park Avenue and then moved to the narrowed streets of lower Manhattan. I "walked" up Church and then landed on Reade street (all intersections show which direction you're heading, and moving forward can be done by clicking in the direction you want to go on the image or holding your mouse down and dragging the image in your desired direction). In the image on the southeast corner of the street, I saw a woman. I zoomed in closer. She was obviously pregnant and wearing a white shirt, black pants, and a gray jacket. I could even tell that she had sunglasses on and was talking on her cell phone. That was kind of creepy.




I decided to see if I could find a way to identify her. I used the PrintScrn key to grab an image of my desktop and then pasted the desktop image into Adobe Photoshop. Then I zoomed in on her and applied an unsharp mask to try and sharpen up her features. No matter what I did, she still never became clear enough for me to say that I saw a "recognizable face." I tried this experiment with a number of images in the New York Maps and never got anything near a real face, no matter what I did in Photoshop.

Fine, I was satisfied that for all the "the sky is falling!" nervous nellies, Google was not in fact spying on us. No one would be caught going to a job interview or exiting a strip club.