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…

So for example here is one of my favourite spots at the moment with some google contour magic:

And you can embed street view images like this one (an image of the office):

Pretty cool! This kind of picking and choosing from the best web mapping provider for the location/task is perhaps the future…

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.

The AGI Northern Group are organising a great event for November 10th in Harrogate called Where2.0 Now.

I really recommend going to this event, there is an excellent line-up of speakers:

• Chris Osborne - http://www.cloudsourced.com/

• Chris Parker - http://www.geovation.org.uk/

• Craig Moulding- http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/siteinfo/online-services/maps/index.jsp

• Dr Michael Sanderson – www.1spatial.com

• Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith - http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/

• Dr. Richard Kingston - http://www.ppgis.manchester.ac.uk/

• Ed Parsons - http://www.edparsons.com/

• Gary Gale - http://www.vicchi.org/

• Harry Wood - http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/

• Jo Cook - http://www.archaeogeek.com/blog/

• John Fagan – www.microsft.com / www.multimap.co.uk

• John McKerrell - http://blog.mapme.at/

• Prof. Henk Scholten - www.geodan.com

• Stuart Harrison - http://www.pezholio.co.uk/

• Tim Warr - http://blog.timwarr.net/

• Tim Waters - http://thinkwhere.wordpress.com/

More info on this event is here and here.

I hope to see you there!

This is a very cool, it displays Open Street Map maps within the Bing Maps Silverlight API.  A super slick silverlighty navigation experience!  You can set the opacity so you can see the bing maps and aerial underneath.  You can even rotate on the X, Y and Z axis!

More info here on this and the interesting concept of “Stacking Maps”.

Which gives this:

I love it!

Thanks to Orange_Monkey!

Search titan Google has been hit with a lawsuit in France with one Bottin Cartographes, a company offering multimedia maps, has filed a complaint with the Paris commercial court regarding the Google Maps service. According to Bottin Cartographes, Google is engaged in unfair business practices as it provides map services for free for a company’s internal use in exchange for the right to sell ads for that company

However Euro 500’000 seems like a very strange number to choose…

I am loving the Where’s Gary map game! 

As mapperz explains:

Walkers Crisps and Multimap have join together to create a fun game.
Find Gary three times in a day and you can claim one ‘Gary’s Great Trips’ point.

I have only managed to find him once so far:

Wondering who Gary is?  See here and here.

Today I went on a trip back to my old stomping ground, Ordnance Survey, to present at CC:The Exchange Conference on web mapping APIs and innovation.  This time I used a bit of HTML and a series of demos (rather than the death by ppt experience).  It seemed to work out well, apart from Ordnance Survey’s Web Sense filter blocking a community news feed form Iran. 

As promised, to those that asked, here are my simple materials and links to all the examples.