Wikibooks: Professionalism/Google Street View and Wi-Spy

• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Subjects: inuit
• Online Access: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Google_Street_View_and_Wi-Spy

= Introduction = Google launched Street View in 2007 to provide street level panoramic views in major cities complementing satellite and aerial photography About Street View About Google Maps. Retrieved from https //www.google.com/maps/about/behind the scenes/streetview/ . Imagery is collected using specialized vehicles equipped with 9 cameras facing in all directions and areas not accessible by cars have been mapped using snowmobiles tricycles divers boats and free walking camera people. As of 2012 Google Street View had collected 20 petabytes of imagery covering 5 million miles of roads in 39 countries. This breadth and depth of coverage has led to novel applications including cross cultural education Austen I. (2012 August 22). Coming Soon Google Street View of a Canadian Village You’ll Never Drive To. The New York Times. Retrieved from http //www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/business/an inuit village too remote for cars gets street view.html wildlife photography virtual sightseeing and immersive tours of businesses . The service raises new privacy challenges since it publishes high resolution images of people homes and vehicles. Google uses automatic feature recognition to blur out faces and license plates before publishing although the algorithms sometimes fail to obscure people with distinctive facial hair for example. While collecting imagery on the ground Google also has many opportunities to collect non image data not accessible during aerial and satellite photography. Specifically their vehicles pass through hundreds of thousands of WiFi hotspots recording their positions at all times and can collect information to improve WiFi based positioning services using specialized software. Additionally many WiFi networks are unencrypted enabling anyone in range of the wireless router to use the connection or intercept information being sent across the network. When first investigated in 2010 by a small German regulatory agency Google denied intercepting such information Google “does not collect or store payload ...