StreetView on Omid Farhang

Google Earth 6: Better Street View and 3D Trees

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:09:00 +0000

Google Earth 6 doesn’t have too many new features. You can now use Street View just like in Google Maps by dragging the pegman icon. “To view street-level imagery for a specific location, zoom into an area at an altitude of approximately 500km. You will see a pegman icon appear at the top right below the navigation controls. Click and drag the icon across the 3D viewer. A blue border will appear around roads that have street-level imagery available,” explains Google.

Reuters: Google says its cars grabbed email and passwords

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 22:07:00 +0000

(Reuters) – Google Inc said its “Street View” cars around the world accidentally collected more personal data than previously disclosed, and that it was changing its privacy practices.

Regulators in some of the more than 30 countries where the cars operated are looking into the issue.

Google’s Street View cars, which are well known for crisscrossing the globe and taking panoramic pictures of the city’s streets, collected the data. The company displays the pictures in its online street maps.

244,000 Germans Opt Out of Google Mapping Service

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:51:00 +0000

BERLIN — Google on Thursday said 244,000 people in Germany had asked the company to remove images of their houses and apartments from its Street View maps, but that the requests would not derail its plans to activate the service this year.

The figure was in line with what German data protection officials had previously estimated. The officials predicted that several hundred thousand people would opt out.

In a blog posting on its Web site, Google said 2.9 percent of the 8.5 million households in Germany’s 20 largest cities had opted out of the service.

Google ditches all Street View Wi-Fi scanning

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:49:00 +0000

Google has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the location of Wi-Fi networks, a practice that led to a flurry of privacy probes after the company said it unintentionally captured fragments of unencrypted data.

The disclosure appeared in a report on Street View released today by Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, who said that “collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it.” Assembling an extensive list of the location of Wi-Fi access points can aid in geolocation, especially in areas where connections to cell towers are unreliable.