Sydney, Australia — If you skipped your opportunity to be immortalized by Google the last time around, be sure to smarten yourself up when you are on the streets this summer. Search engine giant Google’s Street View is gearing up to hitting the road again to capture new, higher-quality images in major Australian cities that will be incorporated into Google Maps.
Ever since it was introduced in Australia in August last year, Google Maps Street View has acted from being an encroaching privacy concern to a voyeuristic gawking tool to a valuable navigation service used by thousands of Australians every day.
Google Street View images showing the man in the Port Melbourne dunny (top left) and several examples from around the world of private activities being captured for public view.
The update, set to begin this month, will see Google’s Street View cars are back on Australian roads, capturing fresh pictures in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and parts of Tasmania.
In a blog posting, Google product manager Andrew Foster said Street View was “most useful” only when imagery is regularly kept up-to-date. He said this was why Google is dispatching the Street View fleet of Holden Astras back out on the road to ensure its panoramic imagery was up-to-date and reflective of what you would see if you visited an area in person.
Foster said “we will be doing our best to cover as many of Australia’s public roads as we can during this summer. The images we are gathering this time will be crisper than before.”
Not only will the images be newer, they will also be of higher quality. Foster mentioned that “It will also enable our face-blurring technology to become even more accurate, as those objects will be more easily recognized.
Foster said that the new pictures would be added to Google Maps “sometime within the next year”. The exact schedule for displaying the new images on Street View is unclear: “sometime within the next year,” Foster added.
“If you are ever uncomfortable with an image that appears in Street View … it is a simple matter to have it blurred or removed,” Foster said.
Street View, which keeps expanding from one country after another is now available in more than 100 cities worldwide, was launched in Canada last month.
Foster indicating to these images, specifically the stonework on the Basilique Notre-Dame, giving an illustration of the quality that we can anticipate from the new Australian images.
However, people are now more acquainted with the Google cars and their difficult to conceal roof-mounted tripods. Many Canadians were photographed making rude gestures at the cameras.
Surely, this new phase of photo session will bring up a fresh round of privacy complaints.
So far Google has been able to mollify some privacy campaigners by blurring number plates and faces of people caught in its lenses and promising only to photograph from public streets.
People who are caught in vulnerable positions — such as a Port Melbourne man snapped sitting on his outhouse dunny — have been able to apply to the company to have images removed from Street View.
Foster said that Google’s internal copy of imagery would be blurred within one year of publication.
“We retain Street View images on our databases so we can do things like improve our blurring technology and check our maps against the images so that we do not give you bad driving directions,” Foster said.
Street View has been contentious since its inception. Google responded by adding automatic face blurring, but concerns continued to be expressed in the UK, Greece and Switzerland, among other places.
A privacy infringement case involving the Street View cars entering private land reached a US court, and there was evidence of similar events occurring in Australia.
Last month, the company announced that it would not keep any unblurred images — even for internal use — for longer than one year after they are first published on Street View (or after October 7, 2010, whichever is the later).
“We will permanently blur images that we retain for internal use within one year of their publication on Street View,” Foster said. “This means that … the only copy we keep will be the one in which faces and license plates are blurred”.
Foster said that Google believed blurring internal images after one year would strike a “good balance between protecting people’s privacy and our ability to reduce mistakes in blurring”.
Google’s global privacy counsel Peter Fleisher said that priority would be given to permanently blurring images that people had specifically asked to be removed from Street View.
Google recently disclosed that it had created a human-powered vehicle (as in the image below) to collect “off-street view” images in areas such as pedestrian malls, parks, and sports venues.
Other places where Google is currently collecting or refreshing Street View images include Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and United Kingdom.