Thursday, January 7, 2010

Google Street View Privacy Complications?

Google Street View is a application from Google that accommodates 360° horizontal and 290° vertical images from a sequence of positions along the street for many streets in the world. These images are currently available in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico, France, Czech Republic, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.

Although I do not usually use google maps, I still think that Google Street View is a good idea. I feel that features similar to these are extremely useful to tourists or anyone that is unfamiliar with their destinations. If you think about it, it's a free world. If I have the right to drive by and look at any house that I choose to, then why wouldn't you be able to look at the same house on the Internet. If the problem is that you worry about your face being shown without your knowledge, or you're worried that people might try to use the information (e.g. your licence plate number)to follow you, then there's need to worry, since google has blurred out the licence plates and faces to maintain privacy. There are several tourists or travelers that would find this application very useful for searching addresses and view, from street level. Google Street View also adds more freedom to people who want to get recognized with their surrounding area before heading there. It’s also much better than the satellite view Google has provided before.

In my opinion, Google Street View provides a revolutionary service that allows people to search addresses and view from street level and photographs that were taken at the area. Another benefit of Google Street View is that it is free. Usually this software would cost quite a lot of money and I’m sure that it wasn’t free for Google to provide such a good benefit. The people opposing Google Street View should look at the benefits of it instead of criticizing the minor flaws.