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Google Street View: Where can it go from here?

Google Street view recently arrived in Australia and is already encountering interesting opinions on privacy in particular. Google Earth and Google Maps are great services already but it certainly does add an extra dimension when you are able to look at a location (360 degrees too) from street level. Of course at street level is where you will find all sorts of people engaged in all sorts of activity who may or may not want to be photographed. This is where privacy advocates are concerned. Do a Google search on Google Street View and you can find a number of articles discussing examples of where,how or when you might not want to be photographed for the world to see. What interests me though is not so much the discussion (interesting as it is) of Google Street View now but what it may look like and how it could be used in the future. Photos are a natural precursor to video so how long is it before Street View or something like it starts using video. There are countless numbers of webcams and video surveillance in our cities now. If you really want a street view to add an extra dimension to Google Earth/Maps why not integrate these into the service. What could you use such a service for? Obviously its great for real estate services, previewing where you might go on holidays etc and could be a great educational resource. How about some other uses? There should be some great mashup opportunities here. Since privacy has been raised as a concern where could this go? Well, a number of social networking services I use have presence awareness so they know when I am online. I can probably be tracked down to a general area using an IP address. So, if you know my identity, that I am online and where I am online at, if there is a webcam or some sort of accessible video surveillance nearby, theoretically it may be possible for you to do a search on me and then click to some sort of video where you can see me, without me knowing it or giving any sort of permission to do so. Is this a good or a bad thing? What if I am not online? I may be carrying my mobile phone with me. Mobiles can supposedly be located easily enough so its probably theoretically possible to track me down to a location using that technology. Of course there are other ways that I can be tracked down which I discussed briefly here. Its interesting to speculate just what sort of services could be available in the next 5 or 10 years and just how powerful and accessible technology is becoming. Cheers, Jerry.

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