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They just have to follow the sames rules used by http://www.pagesjaunes.fr/villeendirect/photo/AfficherPageAccueilPhotosVilles.do which are showing most of big cities streets with a better resolution than Streetview.

But probably not in France either.

For at least 8 years http://www.pagesjaunes.fr/ has had street level photos of cities such as Lyon. I see people in those pictures and while I don't know for sure I doubt that signatures where gathered....

The French Yellowpages have had pictures of addresses with recognizable people on their website for years. Search for an address in Paris then click on "Photo" link. While the pictures are small, and usually taken early enough in the day that few people are around, if you navigate around you can find pictures of buildings with recognizable people in them.

If these privacy kooks want to condemn google, they should have condemned FT first.

True, it is illegal in France. That said, the French yellow pages have implemented a similar "street view" web service on their web site several years ago, which now covers over 30 cities.
(the website linked is in French, but pretty much self explanatory)

Hi,

pagesjaunes.fr (the French yellow pages) did already better years back, they had shot pictures of each streets from Paris and other major cities from France.

See http://photos.pagesjaunes.fr/

This is quite convenient, if you have to use the metro. Before you arive somewhere you can see the exact way you will take and identify the building you have to go visually.

Not sure anybody provided a mashup with google maps or mappy by the way ...

So for once, google is lagging ;-)

Rgs,
TM

The French Yellow Pages has had street level photos for at least eight years. Some people, it seems, make their tax dollars work.

As for M$ doing anything useful, I'll believe it when I can see it with free software. Until then, I'll just imagine they bought someone out and made their stuff crappier, like Hotmail. Is there anything that M$ borgification has improved rather than extinguished?

That would be Pages Jaunes, which is pretty cool for things like finding a restaurant you once ate at, but can only remember what it looked like and approximately what street it was on. Also good for seeing what a place looked like when the pictures were taken (1998 to 1999 era). The site hasn't been much updated, it was a massive effort to take all those photos in the first place. Because French law doesn't allow publishing a photo where an individual can be identified without the persons express written permission, the photo trucks had to take multiple passes, and every photo had to be checked to make sure people couldn't be recognised in each shot.

the AC

nice slum

fyi this service has been available for at least 2 years on the French yellow pages: http://pagesjaunes.fr/ for a few major cities.

Since more than three years, Pages Jaunes (Yellow Pages) from France Telecom has a included in his search service a link to pictures of the address front. You can even virtually walk in the streets of Paris, using their interface to photos.

Make a search there ( using for example:

nom: Follies Bergere
localite: Paris

In the answer you can click in the Photo link and voila (May be you can see the dancers getting into the theater ;))

Amazon implementation is interesting. They have done great in terms of integration.

Also YP companies from Latin America have explored this technology before.

The French yellow pages http://www.pagesjaunes.fr/ put online pictures of the streets of Paris France a few years ago. They did not use a van but good'ol pedestrians with Nikon digital cameras. It was perhaps in 2001 or 2002 if I remember correctly. Now you can visit Paris for free ;-)

In Paris, we have photos of builings on Pages Jaunes (the french yellow pages) for many years. I remember that I was already using this feature in 1998.

A quick reverse directory on that address turns up no company called novinit, but the offices of a couple of shell companies, MMSA/Digiplace. Web design and hosting, with not much history according to google.

Novinit is not a registered company name in France. Perhaps it is the operating name of another company. The website does not offer the required information of a tax number, physical address, and other contact details.

Arnaud de la Fouchardière is the money behind the fly-by-night Marcopoly online store. They've got a bad reputation for shipping various bits of kit which probably fell off the back of trucks, and no after sales service. He made his money from online pr0n, mostly doing the technical front for prostitution rings using the old Minitel service.

There are two sites, novinit.com and jackito-pda.com, one is hosted in France, the other in California. They seem identical in content, but the one hosted on 7x24net in the U.S. has bogus registration information.

The photos of the device on the website are of an Apple Newton.

There is no way to get in touch with this company except through a paypal link. The phone number given for the registrars is a pre-paid anonymous GSM phone on the orange network.

All the hallmarks of a scam.

the AC

A bit hard to navigate, though...

Madrid and Bercelona are alaready online, and most buildings have multiple views.

Check out the databases of several digitized French and Spanish cities, including Paris and Madrid. The stuff also has a navigation system, so you can literally walk around digitally.

The company who did this, the Société de Numérisation des Villes, as far as I can remember, had 20 photographs walking through every street in Paris during 6 months to start up the database. The database was kept current by regularly checking the city records of building authorizations. Now they're part of a bigger company, so who knows what will happen next.

I can't tell you how cool this thing is when you're looking for an apartment. "What's the address? Oh, it's that kind of building. Forget it then."

Go to yellowpages then click on les photos de villes, pick a city, type in the address and look at the building ! I've always wondered what was the point for them to do that, I guess they had money to spare...

The french already did this - check out pages jaunes (pages jaunes is french for Yellow Pages). You can actually look up an address and see a photo of it.

This is interesting, I really don't see how this could be bad, aside from having an ugly house or yard. Actually Europe (more specifically france) has things like this, in their internet yellow pages, there is a picture of every single address. Works great when you are looking for hotels (which is how I found) and want to know what the area looks like.

I can really only see how this can help things, like historical data...how an area looked in a hundred years or something, or with research into an area.

... and here is the Paris visual streetscape map I mentioned above. It's awesome, and doesn't just cover Paris.

The London one is spread out over several unrelated sites.

It's only free for the first three minutes (or is it 90 seconds now?). It may not sound much, but it's far sufficient to do a lookup in the directory (be it white or yellow pages), which is the main use most people had for it. Anyway, the directory service has never been really expensive. France Telecom's white pages and yellow pages web sites work just as well, now, and are offered for free.

As for pr0n, you are right that it was an important factor in the adoption of Minitel in France. By the way, the ubiquituous posters you mention were, most of the times, stuck on the back of road signs or on walls, which is illegal. Such posters still exist today, but they advertise web sites instead of Minitel services. I guess the "content providers" are the same, but the medium has changed.

Paris has had an interactive "You want to see it, tell us the address" site for a few years now. It's not 3D, but it's available to the public.

With tunneling (which consequently allows VPNs)

But the court already ruled on that issue, since it was raised by technical experts close to the court (pres de la cour). The court found that any French citizen who took any extra step to circumvent detection by Yahoo quite clearly was doing so to circumvent the law. That implies the citizen is the law breaker, not Yahoo.

Yahoo, to comply with the court ruling, merely has to filter the content and the IP address, and place a legal disclaimer on the web page requiring the French citizen to click on a button or pop-up to continue. Once the French citizen proceeds into the web page selling/auctioning nazi memorabilia, then it is the citizen breaking the law, not Yahoo.

Yahoo has never been required to eliminate all nazi sales on its web sites. That was the original claim by the anti-hate activist group who launched the first lawsuit, but it was thrown out by an intelligent judge. But the US media, as well as /., continue to propogate a false claim as to the ruling of the French cour.

(A site in the US, for example, could tunnel onto a French network, and act as if a French server...

Why tunnel? With the internet, the physical server can be anywhere, tunneling isn't required, just routing. But Yahoo has a physical presence in Paris (11Bis rue Torricelli), and thus must obey French law, whether they put their servers on Sealand, or in California.

Other auction sites were performing the same filtering function, for both France and Germany, which is why eBay, Amazon, &c. were never part of the lawsuit. eBay has since banned a whole bunch of sensitive items, mooting the point. Certainly the lawyer fees could have paid a dozen PHP programmers a dozen times over for such a filter.

the AC

For example, where can I get my oil changed in Paris, France?

Why should Google replace the yellow pages ?

Can't you just try www.pagesjaunes.fr like any sane person would (hint you'll get 1510 answers, all right on spot).

(duh)