Riding Shotgun With the Google Street View Beetle

longacre writes "Popular Mechanics takes a ride in an Immersive Media VW Beetle, one of the six cars that drives around America shooting images for Google Maps Street View. Mounted on the roof is the $45,000 Dodeca 2360 video camera, whose 11 lenses record a 360 degree field of view at 30 frames per second, sucking up as many as 200 miles of city scenes per day. The setup takes up the whole back seat and part of the front passenger seat, and is all controlled with an off-the-shelf Logitech game controller. Includes a cool interactive raw video of a drive through Manhattan."

Impressive

[Aetuneo]

While this is impressive (especially it being controlled by an off-the-self controller), I would be much more impressed if they rigged up the interior with a lot of HDTVs so that the walls seemed to be transparent to anyone inside.

Social hacking with Google

[jaymzter]

I and a friend separately saw a couple of vehicles driving around the north area of a major Southwestern US city last month. This was no Google van or Google Beetle, it was just some rinky-dink car with a Google magnetic sign on the sides, and presumably a camera assembly set up on a pole about 3 foot from the car roof. It literally looked like Google ran an ad for any joker to bolt a camera to their car and drive around. My friend and I wondered what could be so exciting about the northern suburban area of a large city, rather than in the city itself, that needed to be on Google maps.

Anyway, it got me thinking that pretty much anyone really could put a Google sign or their car to presumably drive someplace they shouldn't, or use a brand like Google to lend themselves some authenticity, and nowadays people might probably not give them a second thought. Imagine if terrorists planned on attacking our imagination using Google as a cover! Or maybe someone could scam a press pass for being a member of "Google News", even though Google News isn't an actual news outlet.

Re:Reasonable expectation of privacy!

[enjahova]

you are in public, about to take public transportation. People in public places may have access to technology that can broadcast to millions of people. The current state of technology changes the definition of reasonable.
There are no laws to prevent this, in fact, in many places the laws are CAUSING this (London, Chicago). Unfortunately for you, your expectations are no longer reasonable.