Google announced today that it's "Street View" technology is now available for the City of Toronto, Hamilton & Kitchener.
How long before this techonology comes to a street corner near you? Hard to say. Obviously, they will concentrate on the major urban centres before branching outwards, but don't be suprised if you see a strange car prowling your streets with a bubble top camera mounted to the roof in the near future.
I've been using Google maps to map the location of my listings for a little over a year now and I am quite pleased with the results. You can see the map by clicking on this link: http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=100994378639370539596.000451d4d000bf1f6938a&z=9
How do you feel about this technology? Google claims they are going to great lengths to ensure that privacy is maintained, blurring faces and licence plates in any image. Is it cool? Creepy? Reminiscent of Orwell's "1984"? Feel free to leave comments and let me know what you think!
Read the article from today's Toronto Star below...
This Street View image shows University Ave., looking south from College St.
IMAGE COURTESY GOOGLE MAPS
As of this morning, you can check Google Maps to see your neighbour gardening or count how many green bins the house up the street has.
And true to its word, Google has blurred faces and licence plates on the images of every house and condo and lamp post in greater Toronto, Hamilton and Kitchener in the "live" images.
A spokesman for Google in Toronto said the timing was just a matter of "getting everything tweaked" so that concerns raised by privacy advocates about security were addressed."
The pictures are the result of a blitz last spring when Google Street View cars with roof-top cameras prowled the streets capturing cyclists in mid-sprint, pedestrians with their shopping and homeowners tidying up.
To see the images, you need to pull the human figure at the top of the Google Maps zoom bar onto the map and jiggle it up and down the street for the best view.
The arrival in April of the Google cars inspired artists in Toronto to put together performance pieces in the hopes of international exposure, matching the same enthusiasm the cars had brought to cities such as London and Pittsburgh.
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