The first Google Maps “mashup” was created by a developer named Paul Rademacher. A mashup is a term meaning an extension to the usability of Google Maps beyond just satellite images and street maps. Rademacher envisioned that housing ads on Craigslist could be linked to Google Maps. His idea was whenever anyone searched for a Craigslist apartment ad in say, Vancouver, they could immediately see all the relevant postings displayed as pushpins on a Google Map. He set up a site called HousingMaps, and thus Google Maps mashups were born. This idea became very popular, thus Google made it much easier for developers to make mashups, and Google Maps’ functionality suddenly sky rocketed.
With these mashups, Google Maps could display nearly anything quite quickly: restaurants, tourist attractions, gas stations, news events, photographs. Of course this was combined with the already powerful google search engine and their powerful geographic image.
This opened the door for things like virtual tourism, you can visit the most famous sites of the world in a few clicks. It allowed people to see some of the devastating harm to the environment that clear cutting in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil has caused. But there were also positive humanitarian uses, including the fact that Google Maps released detailed before and after imagery of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, whereby the Coast Guard could be informed of the areas hit hardest by flooding. The ability for people to interact with Google Maps led this to be a truly online world, where whatever may interest anyone could be inserted and become a part of this online world.
An inevitable result of the Google Maps project was Google Street View. All that was needed was a few Toyota Prius’ with 11 strategically mounted cameras, and a whole lot of miles logged, and eventually the whole world’s streets would be logged. It was only natural that people would want to be able to see photos of what they were trying to map. Not just a bird’s eye view, but to actually be in the street and have a 360 view of everything around them. However, when the resolution of these images became so great that one could make out tiny details of buildings, cars on the street, and even people in plain site, it opened a new can of worms.
Naturally these issues led to some privacy concerns, so Google simply blurred out the faces of anyone in sight of the street view vehicles, as well as any license plates in view. Outside of these two minor precautions, Google viewed everything it photographed with its vehicles in public just that, suitable for public viewing. This worried some at first, especially in regards to areas that may threaten national security (ie. Overhead views of The White House, Airports, Military Bases, etc.) however, what many failed to realize was the vast majority of these images were already available online at several other sites, and google themselves collected these images from private companies’ own satellite images, implying public and free ownership already. So in reality, any attempts to mitigate this “information leak” would be completely pointless.
This does not mean that we as a society must sign away all of our personal identity and information carte blanche, whereby there is nothing to fear of a company whose slogan may be “Don’t be Evil.” There is a bit of an Orwellian “Big Brother” aspect happening here, where even though Google itself appears to be altruistic with their intentions, we must be weary of the amount of people that can view us at this very moment in time. Its scary to think how easy it is to track down someone with the latest technology. As an example, imagine a person you know, type their name and city into a yellow pages engine online. From this an address pops up. Simply type this into Google Maps, and voila, you have a street view of their house, and possibly their car sitting right out front as well. This is all in the matter of a few seconds as well, with no fancy tracking software or anything. Just a computer with an internet connection (or even a blackberry for that matter). This kind of stuff makes me glad I’m not listed. Wait a minute, maybe I should take all this text off of the internet.
i will be talking about further Google Maps Extensions in another post
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
