Google is watching, by Jeffrey Veen

Google is watching

Recently, Matt has been collecting and posting the interesting things showing up in the new satellite imagery on Google Maps. Just today, he and Andy point out a couple of beautiful evaporation pools. Matt goes on to describe with impressive detail exactly how the chemistry of the pools differ. Satellite analysis by an armchair scientist.

At the same time, the new Google feature is making people not a little uncomfortable. A friend yesterday said she always knew the machines buzzing around up there had cameras, but it was a little much to see her car in the driveway. How would it feel, for example, to be caught vacationing on Lake Tahoe. Parodies have been quick, as the fine folks at Defective Yeti point out.

But privacy goes both ways, doesn't it? Ultimately Orwell was right: everything we do will be watched. But he was wrong about the government building it. We did it ourselves. Which means where Matt sees chemistry, I see environmental accountability. Where others see surveillance, I see corporate whistle-blowing. It reminds me of the Surfrider Foundation's project to get kayakers in the San Francisco Bay to cameraphone the bilge coming out out of container ships. What happens when thousands of grassroots activists can click-and-drag through the remote places in this country? Clearcut! Oil spill! You can't dump that there -- we're watching!

Either way, mountains of "public" data being made accessible to everyone through an intuitive user experience (and it is the experience that makes the difference) will raise issues we haven't even imagined. I feel like we've only just scratched the surface.

Update: Google Sightseeing is a blog collecting interesting satellite images from the service.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 7 April 2005 at 9:01 AM. It was filed under Technology.

Comments

1. On 7 April 2005 at 9:18 AM Jason Wall wrote:

In regards to people getting uncomfortable: this technology isn't new. Mapquest had a sattelite imagery feature two years ago, and I remember surfing microsofts terraserver back in college (7 years ago). 1 Meter imagery over the US has been freely available for a long time.

What makes this fact interesting is that the people getting excited over the imagery are geeks (the A listers who have weblogs). Why is it such a big thing all of a sudden?

On a more humorous note, a guy I work with has his name etched in a field, which was caught by Google here: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=bunker+hill,IL&ll=39.014329,-89.979132&spn=0.006008,0.008615&t=k&hl=en

2. On 7 April 2005 at 9:25 AM veen wrote:

"1 Meter imagery over the US has been freely available for a long time."

Totally. As have detailed ZIP code and GPS data that would likely frighten folks even more. The difference is not that A-List bloggers are posting about it. Rather, it's that Google created such an easy-to-use app that people suddenly realize the power of this data.

I used the 'net for 5 years before there were Web browsers. But Mosaic instantly showed everyone the value of standards-based public networks. Same thing, I think.

3. On 7 April 2005 at 9:40 AM Elliot wrote:

I've been enjoying finding some real gems with google maps, but how does one go about getting a usable url for google maps if you don't know the longitude and latitude?
Without this it makes it a bit hard to share.

4. On 7 April 2005 at 10:16 AM Jacob Harris wrote:

Jeffrey, your perspective and review of the privacy concerns surrounding Google's satellite reviews reminds me of David Brin's concept of a Transparent Society in 1996. You'll probably find it interesting (link) because he proposes a similar way of looking at the inevitable profusion of security cameras everywhere (giving power to the people).

Essentially, there is a choice between two future societies. One is the Orwellian nightmare state where we are all under constant surveillance and only the police control the cameras. And the alternative is a Transparent Society, where anybody can look through any camera (exception: cameras in homes), so the walls of secrecy are broken down. It's a novel way of looking at it, and if it's inevitable, I'd certainly prefer this situation over Orwell.

5. On 7 April 2005 at 11:14 AM Matt Haughey wrote:

"What makes this fact interesting is that the people getting excited over the imagery are geeks (the A listers who have weblogs). Why is it such a big thing all of a sudden?"

I don't think that's it at all, I know terraserver and mapquest have had this, they've just been such a pain to use. What is extraordinary about Google Maps is that it's draggable, so I can wander around in Utah until I find something cool looking that I couldn't do as easily in Terraserver. And not to wave my "a-list cred" around, but I remember a wave of bloggers in 1999 and 2000 that found their houses on teraserver and posted about it (including evhead, though I can't find the original references). I remember trying my hardest to find my childhood home in teraserver but coming up empty, but I found it in about 2 minutes on Google Maps.

It's all about the UI, and this one is amazingly easy to use. I know it's not the first, but it's definitely the best so far. That's why I was raving about it.

6. On 7 April 2005 at 1:01 PM tim wrote:

i agree with matt, being able to drag your way around lets you explore in a way you couldn't before -- i dragged my way from portland to the coast and down to the bay area yesterday. that was cool.

as for privacy, i'd be more concerned with flickr photo streams (or Amazon's yellow pages) than satellite imagery. sat images are nowhere close to real-time, and there's far fewer sats compared to amateur snappers sharing photos.

besides, the resolution is actually pretty poor. i've seen way better regional online map products put up by cities -- where utilities, builders, planners, etc. use the data. On one product, I was able to clearly spot my mom's car in her driveway.

7. On 7 April 2005 at 3:11 PM huphtur wrote:

Check the roof of The White House and surrounding buildings (zoom in a bit)
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1600+Pennsylvania+Avenue+NW+Washington,DC+20500.&spn=0.009634,0.007875&t=k&hl=en

8. On 7 April 2005 at 10:05 PM Bronwyn wrote:

There are some books that have non-Orwellian pervasive surveillance as a background technology:

David Brin's Kiln People
Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, consisting of Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids.

Both of them presented plausible cases for it having a net benefit. Sawyer did touch on the creepiness of it (to someone from our society), though!

9. On 7 April 2005 at 11:53 PM Ara wrote:

Click on this link and then go to satelite view:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=94123&ll=37.29943,-115.76939

Google ignores the zipcode and the L/L are those of
"Groom Lake" in Nevada. After a certain point,
it doesn't let you zoom anymore.

10. On 8 April 2005 at 12:38 AM Ryan Oswald wrote:

I only scanned previous comments so this may have been mentioned, but I didn't notice. This may have already been discussed elsewhere as well.

You raise some interesting questions. It seems as we become even more increasingly inner-connected and new modes of communicating filter into society; I wonder if our desire to communicate face-to-face deminishes? Just a thought, but how much text messaging do you do? Where you used to just call and "speak" to someone, do you know just text message them? How has this deminished your "actual" social interactions? I guess its the postmodern idea that because of a media saturated society; preconcived notions about what reality really is begin to inhibit us. So maybe we continue to retreat into our "huts" and hide from the satellites, each other, reality.

There are some interesting things going on at flickr. There is a group using google maps and notes to create "memory maps". I just started my own group with a similar concept except using mobile logging (moblogging) and satellite maps to log and map your daily mobile activity using notes as narrative.

11. On 8 April 2005 at 1:37 AM Roy Schestowitz wrote:

I don't mean to be the party pooper, but there is a reason why the whole net is aware of this and gets excited. It is simply because it's Google. I looked at satellite images just like that in 1999 or 2000 and found friends' houses. It wasn't as hip at the time because there wasn't much of a buzz.

12. On 8 April 2005 at 8:28 AM Jason Wall wrote:

Elliot,

Try using the "Link to This Page" link on the upper right bar.

In retrospect, Kottke mentioned both the fact that imagery has been around and also pointed to the UI as the reason is has created so much buzz. And this makes sense to me to some degree. It just struck me odd that it would create as much buzz as it did considering the reletive age of the information.

On another note, has anyone noticed the relative difference between the datasets used over major cities and that used over most of the rest of the US? Landsat Natural View isn't very detailed and the color is off somewhat, and Digital Globes data is also less detailed. But the USGS has 1 foot per pixel imagery over 130+ cities in the US and that is what I think Google is using over the cities. Go here: http://seamless.usgs.gov/ .The ESRI ArcIMS interface is a bit clunky, but you can do more with it like download the data in GeoTIFF format and mess with it in photoshop, calculate distances, get street names and other metadata overlaid on the map.

Check it out.

13. On 8 April 2005 at 10:56 AM Yeah, you're right Roy wrote:

I don't mean to be the party pooper, but there is a reason why the whole net is aware of this and gets excited. It is simply because it's Blogging. I looked at time-stamped text files just like that in 1991 or 1992 and found friends' thoughts. It wasn't as hip at the time because there wasn't much of a buzz.

14. On 8 April 2005 at 3:23 PM Jason Fraser wrote:

In general I like the idea of having good access to information. (I know the access has been there for years, but I don't care to quibble.) I do think that it's important to remember that the intelligence material that I can use, say, to make a large corporation clean up it's act, can also be used by people with a far more sinister intent. It's interesting that the top of the White House and surrounding buildings are censored (see huphter's post above), but there are penty of "softer" public targets.

15. On 9 April 2005 at 5:23 AM Vitaly Friedman wrote:

Interesting, interesting... however, I was wondering whether Google is planning to create a similar service for European countries?

16. On 9 April 2005 at 3:36 PM Travis Wilson wrote:

No, the draggable UI isn't new either. See Switzerland's entry ( http://map.search.ch/index.en.html ), which beat Google to market by a few months plus whatever time I was unaware of it. Draggable, zoomable, and you can overlay the street map atop the aerial photo. I appreciate the "it's the user experience, stupid" approach to what makes technology popular, but it's also the marketing, stupid.

17. On 12 April 2005 at 9:48 AM Chuck wrote:

Jeffrey, you make an interesting point that "We did it ourselves." but in fact the government jumped right on board just two years after Keyhole was started. According to [http://keyhole.com/body.php?h=about#company ] Keyhole was enhanced "with funding from In-Q-Tel and deployment by NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency." (In a google search for more information on NIMA both top results [nima.mil and nga.mil] were down)

Although I am no conspiracy theorist and in no way feel the least bit threatened by this technology I think it is worth noting that the government did indeed help to fund Keyhole.

18. On 13 April 2005 at 9:24 AM tom wolf wrote:

I find most of the concerns about this recent upgrade of the Google Maps rather humorous myself. Keyhole has been available for quite sometime and similar services have been around much longer. It is important for you to realize most of the images are on average 2-4 years old.
Another point I found interesting, refering back to another earlier comment about the White House, it's curious that the roof has been altered assumingly for security purposes yet if you pan to the SW the roof of the Pentagon appears unaltered.

19. On 15 April 2005 at 12:15 AM Adam Kennedy wrote:

If you like Google Maps Satellite, you'll LOVE NASA World Wind. Twice the resolution ( in 15 major cities ) fully OpenGL 3D with overlayed maps on the 3D topological views.

Want an example? Going to OSCON 2005?

Here's my 2 minute tour of OSCON. It's neat being able to see exactly where you'll be staying when you are travelling from the other side of the world (Australia) to get there.

At least if all goes wrong I can just sit in a taxi with a zoomed in 3D view and give instructions on how to get there.

http://ali.as/OSCON/

20. On 18 April 2005 at 4:42 PM Andrew Hedges wrote:

The problem with using Google Maps to hold companies accountable for environmentally dastardly acts is that these maps are nowhere near being rendered in real time. Most of them are close to a decade old. If Monsanto is caught on camera dumping boatloads of chemicals into Lake Havasu 10 years ago, it's probably not going to cause much of a stink (pun intended).