UPDATE: An official complaint has been made to the UK authorities about Google Street View. Is the service about to be shut down?
Google Street View has been available in the US for a while, bringing usefulness, privacy concerns and hilarity in equal measure. Now the Google Street View team has hit the UK, bringing ground-levels snaps of Britain’s streets to the web.
The Google Street View team have captured 22,369 miles of UK streets using specially adapted cars, fitted with multiple cameras and GPS equipment.
The result is that you can now take a virtual walk along the streets of London, Birmingham, Bristol, Aberdeen and Manchester, as well as numerous other towns and cities.
Cleverly, Google Street View is addressing privacy concerns by using face recognition software to automatically blur out faces and number plates. But that’s not all. Google also says there’s a “Where’s Wally” character, complete with stripy jumper, hidden somewhere in the UK’s Google Street View maps. Will you be the first to find it?
Out now | £free | Google
If people are complaining about street view and privacy, why are they not complaining about daily news broadcasts showing people in real time, every day on the hour???