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The Cook County Assessors office already photographs homes and makes the photographs available online.

http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/ccao/startres.ht ml

You can just search by address and find a lot of the public information about private residences online, including photos in most cases (in all cases in the small sample I've tried).

I wonder how common this is with other regional governments?

actually, my fiance and I use the service from our county assessor's website while we look for houses because it's often a more direct and closer shot than what you find on real estate sites, especially for newpaper ads. of course, this is nothing new.

They've been doing this in a lot of areas for a long time. Here in the chicago area, the cook county assessor's office will show you the front view of almost any building if you know the address.
I'm sure this is nothing new, especially for highly populated areas. This company of couse could offer to provide updated photos, but the service itself has already been here.

In Cook County (Chicago, IL) the assessors office has already been taking pictures from the street of the front facade of every property in the county for at least the last 7 years. http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/

The pics are online using the Cook County Assesor website..

For the SSN, there was an article in the latest 2600 about how to live w/o your ssn. Living in Chicago, i have the joy of being in a place where the County accessor's office is online(Where the blues bros ended up at the end of the movie, before jail), so you can see photos, and values of any property in the city. They were driving around in unmarked vans photographing your house!!! Worse than this, the cops have small laptops hooked to a centralized db w/ all available info on you(regardless of if you have commited a crime). So when you get pulled over, they know the color of your house, how much in taxes you pay, and your mother's eye color. ( They demonstrate these so often, it isnt even novel anymore ) But there are benefits, for instance, you can see how bad the crime is in an area before you move there. I believe a balance can be struck, it just requires thought, something that is in short supply.

While not a good explanation, you may be interested in one of the main uses of said information: lowering taxes. If your house has been appraised to be XXX dollars, but you feel that is too much, when re-appraisals roll around you can argue that your house costs too much and site "comparables", other houses in your neighborhood which are similar to yours (same neighborhood, same township, similar size) that have been appraised to be a lower amount, or have even sold for lower amounts (to prove that it may not have been worth much to begin with). This is really the best argument you have during this time.

If you want to see some worse data, check out Cook county (includes Chicago). From http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/ (direct to search: http://www.cookcountyassessor.co m/startsearch.html) you can not only find out the appraisal information, you can see the number of bathrooms, bedrooms, state of the attic, basement, size of garage, really a full break down of the entire state of the house.

I don't see much wrong with it myself (most of this was all in listings and such when I bought the house in the first place), but the shear amount of information that can be compiled does hit me back sometimes :).

While not a good explanation, you may be interested in one of the main uses of said information: lowering taxes. If your house has been appraised to be XXX dollars, but you feel that is too much, when re-appraisals roll around you can argue that your house costs too much and site "comparables", other houses in your neighborhood which are similar to yours (same neighborhood, same township, similar size) that have been appraised to be a lower amount, or have even sold for lower amounts (to prove that it may not have been worth much to begin with). This is really the best argument you have during this time.

If you want to see some worse data, check out Cook county (includes Chicago). From http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/ (direct to search: http://www.cookcountyassessor.co m/startsearch.html) you can not only find out the appraisal information, you can see the number of bathrooms, bedrooms, state of the attic, basement, size of garage, really a full break down of the entire state of the house.

I don't see much wrong with it myself (most of this was all in listings and such when I bought the house in the first place), but the shear amount of information that can be compiled does hit me back sometimes :).