As always we can expect some cheap journalism around privacy issues like this one, but my local free paper Tiroler Woche have surpassed themselves with a journalistic extravaganza on NORC’s application.  The leader starts:

Luxusvillen von Mafia ausspioniert.  Ostmafia hat Innsbruck im Visier.  Per Mausklick koennen sich Ostbanden einen perfektem Ueberblick ueber Innsbruck verschaffen.

Tiroler Woche Do, 15. April 2010

Which basically translates as something like:  ”Mafia spying on luxury villas.  Eastern european mafia have Innsbruck in their sights.  With a mouse click eastern bandits can get a perfect view of Innsbruck.”

So the fear of burglaries is standard in any Street View story, but the Eastern European Mafia sounds impressive.  The link?  Well NORC is based in Bucharest so they must of course be Eastern European Mafia.

What a journalistic masterstroke, combining privacy fears, crime and Xenophobia all in one story.

I’m no Google fan boy, but the one thing I seem to be always defending is Google Street View. It really is not that big an invasion of privacy compared to CCTV although you have to admire this rather more direct Austrian response to Street View.

There seem to be endless stories in the mainstream press about privacy/security violations from Street View.  However a little thought and investigation usually reveals they are nonsense.  In fact should that not be the journalists job?

So this blog post in got geoint caught my eye, it points to a cnet story, which in turn points to story in the Daily Telegraph.  In this  story someone states that their mountain bike was stolen from their garage and say this is because their open garage appeared on Street View and you could see the contents.

As the victim says:

“When you look at the photograph, my face is blacked out, the windows of my house are blacked out but because the garage door was left open, you can clearly see everything in there.

“I would argue that they should have blacked that out. It is just an invitation for any criminal to take what they like.”

He has very sensibly:

“…now removed anything of value.”

And of course I am sure he used the simple link in Street View to request removal of the image.

Reading the article more closely I noticed that he reveals the following personal data:

• Firstname
• Surname
• Age
• Profession
• The Street he lives on (and there is only one with that name in the UK)
• The county he lives in

Oooops – that is a lot more privacy gone…  So then I wondered, can I find this offending image on Google Maps?  Well it took about 3 minutes:

copyright google

All I had to do was a google search for the street name and then browse along it, using street view, until I found an open garage.  And there it was…  Oh, and I now know his house number too…

So he was so busy complaining about the evils of google he forgot to ask them to remove the image and revealed yet  more personal details in a national newspaper.  Nice one!

Before I get accused of invading his privacy further I have requested removal of the image on his behalf using this easy approach.  And I have not repeated any of the information!

So please could we just get over this privacy paranoia and start using Street View as the great dataset it is.  Remember it is almost the same debate we are having now when we first had caller id and now that is just another tool of our lives…

BTW nearby I discovered this amusing scene:

copyright google

I wonder how they ended up there?

Incidentally I have had 2 mountain bikes stolen from a garage about 12 years before anyone ever thought of street view.  My tip – keep your bikes in your house!

Update 15/4/10

Following my image removal request I have now had an email response from the Google Map Team:

Our records show that you recently reported an image within Google Maps Street View. This image has been removed from our service and will disappear within the next 24 hours.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and appreciate your patience while we dealt with this.

If you still see the image after 24 hours, your browser’s cache may cause the issue. Please clear your browser’s cache and check the image. To clear the cache, please check the link below.

A nice, simple and reasonably fast service.

Update 16/4/10

And now the image has been removed by the Google Maps Team:

I am now not sure if I have helped someone save their privacy or needlessly damaged a dataset in the public domain. I can’t decide…

Photo: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response.  From BBC News

And I love this little story:

Plymouth Ski Centre at Marsh Mills was forced to close on Wednesday due to the icy conditions.

(from bbc news)

What?!

So there are all kinds of rumours flying around today about apple’s immenent release of a tablet type device.

From the geo perspective there is some interesting speculation (initially based on trademarks) on the Vector 1 blog and Geek.com about a new apple mapping application (or platform) coming with it.  Do we have another disruptive mapping technology about to arrive?  Google needs some decent competition in this space and the idea of apple ‘doing maps’ is rather exiting…  On the other hand is it always going to tied to apple’s ‘closed’ platforms?

The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April…..Gordon Brown announced the change at a joint event in London today…In the new year Brown intends to publish 2,000 sets of data…

Is this too good to be true???  We will have to wait until April to see what this really means.

Perhaps this could be a renaissance for Ordnance Survey and massively increase it relevance to the economy and society?  It will be nice to be looking at more of the UK’s home-grown cartography on the web (rather than the bland cartography from Google and Microsoft).

A video of the announcement is here.

I have been enjoying exploring the A-Z 1930’s mapping on the A-Z’s site.  I love the ‘sepia’ cartographic style and the way the whole page matches the colour!  It just goes to show that colour is not everything in cartography.

Thank you Mrs. Pearsall, you have helped me around London countless times.

I have been taking some time to explore there latest spatial thinking and innovations by Yahoo!.  Setting aside some of the current business politics, I think Yahoo! are doing some of the most interesting stuff at the moment. 

It started a while ago with their Where On Earth (WOE) IDs.  Basically these provide a hierarchical identifier system based on location.  I must admit it took me ages to realise what these are all about.  I have a map centric view centric view of the world and places, so it seemed very odd at first.  WOE IDS geo-tag (i.e. locate) things in a very different way (with no need for a map or lat/lon).  When talking about a place all people really care about is what place it is and how to ensure that they are all talking about the same place (even if you might individually define its extent differently).  Lets take an example, if we want to share data relating to Soho, how do we make sure we are talking about the same place?  So with this system we do not have to argue endlessly about what the lat/lon of Soho is (or even worse try and define it’s extent), all we have to agree on is that Soho is in London which is in England which is in Great Britain, give it an ID and then we know we are talking about the same place… 

So what I love about WOE ID is it is a simple non mapping solution to an age old spatial problem.  In fact a map is ultimately relegated to just a display function.

So ahy has this now got really interesting?  Well Flickr has been storing WOE IDs for geo-tagged photos.  From this Yahoo! have been able to predict the extent of places (with WOE IDs) based on the geo-tags for the relevant Flickr photos.  The resulting geometries are know as Alpha Shapes.  So this is a completely different way to discover more about the geo-extent of a place.  Taking the Soho example (which BTW is not an officially defined area) we can define it’s extent by what most people (taking photos) think it is.  There are examples and details of this approach here on the Flickr development blog.. 

What I love about this is that, by taking a non map-centric view of place, Yahoo have developed an approach that can tell us more about what the the perceived geographic extent of a place is.  No GIS person would ever think of doing it this way round!

Even better you can get the data yourself (as ESRI shapefiles) and try the software Yahoo use to create the Alpha Shapes (called Clustr).

More details on Alpha Shapes are blogged here too.

Lets hope this innovation continues!

A cool new book, The Atlas of the Real World by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford (published by Thames & Hudson), has a whole new series of cartograms.  Although using cartograms for representing demographic (and other) information is nothing new, the visual impact and qulaity of these are awesome.  I would love to know what software and processes they are using (I am assuming it is automated).

More info is on the CR Blog and Mark Easton’s Blog.

Thanks to Nick Wade for finding this.

Update

I have now noticed that these are done by http://www.worldmapper.org, using “Diffusion-based method for producing density equalizing maps“. 

The BBC has a slightly more morbid use of maps here.

Thanks to Kev Pridgeon for spotting this. 

Update

Jason Lee points out that these maps were originally done by the guys at Sheffield University.  They do some other interesting stuff including defining an actual England North/South divide. 

One of my favourite trips in Innsbruck is a trip on the Stubaitalbahn.  This is a tram that winds it way out of Innsbruck and into the alpine Stubaital valley and is also a great way of getting into the mountains for some fantastic walking.  It is quite intriguing how the tram winds its way around the mountainsides to make it up to the village of Fulpmes.  So I thought it would be interesting to create a VE mashup to see the route on a map and most importantly in 3D.

So here is my mashup.

Although it looks good in 2D:

It only really comes to life when you switch to the 3D view:

So how did I make this?

Well I used MapCruncher.  MapCruncher is a great free Microsoft tool to take a map image, georectify it and then chop into automatically into tiles which match the Virtual Earth tile specification.  It then generates a sample mashup application for you which you can easily modify to you needs.

Essentially I found a map of the line here and imported it into MapCruncher.  I then had to match points that correspond on your map and the Virtual Earth mapping.  I this case I set about 20 points along the track, at the edge of bends or stations:

Next I set the white areas of the map image as transparent. Then all I had to do is render the tiles using the renderer:

Simple!

For more help there are resources on the MapCruncher site and this video gives a good overview.

Now I only need to get some photosynths done of the trams and I’m a fully fledged tram-spotter….