Friday, April 18, 2008

Google Street View Cars Spotted in Italy

It looks like Google is preparing to bring their panorama photos as part of Google Maps to Europe. Above photo was taken by DNAKiller in Rome, who posted it along with other photos in the forum saying, “This morning, on my motorbike ... What a strange car, seemes like a google one ... and it was!” The icon on the car is the same as the Google Street View icon. Above the car, a pole is erected containing the cameras. TomHTML comments on another photo set from Milan, saying that the license plate is Italian too.

At the moment, Google Street View is a feature only showing for some US cities (like Chicago, New York, San Francisco and others). It is expected to come to Australia though, and with these recent developments, likely other parts of the world too. In some countries, Google may face stronger barriers in terms of privacy regulations guiding what people are allowed to photograph (e.g. in Germany, you are not allowed to just snap a photo of someone and publish it; you may be allowed to do so if the person is part of a crowd and not the center of attention, but with Google Street View, it’s hard to judge whether photos depict a crowd or individual persons, as both views are possible depending on where you zoom to. Many traditional laws seem to not yet reflect technological and cultural developments such as crowd intelligence applied to large aggregated & interactive data sets).

[Thanks Hebbet and DNAKiller!]

Google Street View Cars S ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (6+19)

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