Mapping the World

"Here, take a look at this. It's our house," he said, pushing the laptop over.

Indeed it was, clear as day. At first I didn't realize what I was looking at as it looked like one of the many pictures of the house I have on my own computer. Then it dawned. This was a picture of our house in British Columbia on Google Map Street View.

360-degree images at street level. Turn left, you see down the street. Turn right, you look the other way, down to the forest at the end of the street. There's the neighbors' houses. There's the neighbors' cars. There's the tenant's garbage bags, must be collection day. There's the tenant's grandkids' basketball net.

What's going on? Someone is wandering up and down the streets of this little town of 7000 people in the middle of Vancouver Island taking pictures of all the houses? Apparently so.

We checked out the old house in Ottawa. Yes there it was. Sort of. The new owners have ploughed under our front garden and replaced it with grass. Oh well. Chacun a son gout, to each his own. There's our neighbor's house across the street. This is becoming decidedly creepy to me. Does this mean that anyone can look at your house and your car and even at your kids playing in the front yard? Sure enough, there, at the end of the street are a couple of children on the sidewalk in front of the house. Recognizable to whoever wants to recognize them.

It gets worse.

That very night, I'm reading an article about this in the Herald Trib. Google is in hot water and the temperature seems to be rising. The German authorities are up in arms now because apparently as the company was sending all these people in their little cars and bikes down the streets of the country taking pictures, they were also picking up and recording information from people's unsecured wireless connections -  even email communications and visited websites, in violation of German laws on privacy and data collection. They've been doing this not just in Germany but apparently everywhere they've been street mapping. Google originally denied this but has now "reversed earlier denials" and admitted that they did it, saying however that the data collection was inadvertent and the result of a programming error.

Sure it was.

Aislin cartoon found through GOOGLE Image Search