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Google StreetView Is In Your Driveway
hermit_crab writes "Janet and George McKee are the neighbors of the Borings, who we discussed yesterday as the couple suing Google over StreetView. The McKees own a house that is featured in a much more intrusive set of Google StreetView images. 'The Google car continued past the steps leading to the McKees's front door and came to a stop outside the house's three-car garage (and next to the family's trampoline and portable basketball rim). Taking photos all the time, the Google vehicle was squarely on private property, a fact that presumably should have been apparent when the gravel path became paved.' Unlike the Borings, the McKees have not announced intentions to sue Google, nor have they requested to have the images removed."
Why should that be apparent? There are gravel public lanes (and even a road or two) in my city, and it never would have occurred to me that such a thing would automatically mean private property.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
They have no right to be on private property.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Those are low-resolution photos of someone's driveway. Fume all your want, the outside of your house is not legally private. You may get upset by me standing on a public road and gawking at it for the whole day, but there is not anything you can do about that (unless I make any threatening comments about my future intent).
Did people forget how to buy curtains?
More over; this still comes down to the basics of; "if you have nothing to hide, then what is the problem?"
If you don't understand why "if you have nothing to hide, then what is the problem?" is a problem, then you really don't understand this issue.
Uh, all the time in my home town. Many roads were nothing more than cross cuts between fields or around farms, and short sections would be dirt, gravel, or paved. Many paved sections would have long runs where there were not lines painted on it. Some of these roads led to as few as 2 or 3 houses. Some to public parks. Some to the community running track and socker field. What was a road or a driveway was not clearly obvious.
Also, perhaps the driver was simply pulling up to see if there was part of the driveway to turn around in, without having to pitch a k-turn on a single lane gravel road in a big google van...
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Perhaps Google should be reviewing the photos before putting them on their website, instead of assuming that all pictures are OK.
It's pretty obvious that they were on someone's private driveway, and that they tried to turn around on someone's private property. Whoops, mistakes happen, but that's why you verify the results afterwards.
From the fine article:
... the Streetview driver drove down a named road marked on his map, which wasn't posted as private, wasn't obviously private, and ended up having to find a place to turn around at the end ... which just happened to be in the driveway of these homeowners. So what? As a homeowner myself, I hardly find this outrageous ... people turn around in my driveway all the time. And although Streetview has missed my house by a block, I'm not going to be outraged when they finally come back.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0407081google2.html
I se no evidence of "private road" signs, nor do I see "no trespassing" signs. The house is certainly not visible from the main street, and it's not really visible where the "gravel" portion of the driveway becomes "concrete", which was supposed to be some big tipoff.
I fail to be impressed
They were clearly and undeniably in the couples' driveway. If it were a driveway, why would the city/county have given it a name?
I think there's a lot of deniability there.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Which is pretty much how I suspect this will break down.
Resident: You drove on my property!
Google: This county road?
Resident: That's my driveway!!!!
Google: Hold on while I get the county commisioner in on this.
Resident: NEVERMIND, HAVE A NICE DAY!!!!
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Obvious to you maybe after just read an article about it, but how obvious would it be to someone who just spent the past 7 hours staring at a slide show of strangers houses.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Q. Why are the Borings suing Google and not the van drivers who committed the trespass?
A. The van drivers are paid $7/hour and Google is worth $25 Billion.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Q: Why are the van drivers there in the first place?
A: Because Google paid them to be.
You and everyone else who has posted similar things below you are arguing semantics and missing the point.
How many public roads lead directly *into* a person's garage? At some point, the road changes from public to private property. Would you think the safer assumption would be that the private property begins at the threshold of the garage or somewhere earlier? It's quite rare to buy a house without buying the lot around it. If you assume that the property line does begin somewhere before the garage, where would you naturally assume that to be? Well, luckily you have an obvious line between gravel and pavement to tell you.
I can understand these guys mistakenly driving down this family's driveway and then having nowhere to turn around until they got to the garage area. But then you've gotta delete the photos. You can't tell me these guys didn't know they were on private property at *some* point, and the obvious line is where the road changes from gravel to paved.
Google should then add a simple mechanism to the vans that allows the drivers to set a "last couple images are bad" marker. They turn into a driveway by accident or stop to refuel and as soon as they notice/are done, they press a button and the system sets a marker that tells the post-processing team that all images since the last turn are probably bad. The post-processing team can then just scan for those markers and closely examine the images preceding them; if the drivers pay a bit of attention that could cut down on images that shouldn't be in the database.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Oh please.
Did you bother to look at the pictures? It's clear that this an invasion of privacy. Here's a clue. Read the articles again and look at the pictures again, but replace "Google" with "Microsoft", then see if you have the same opinion on the matter.
Damn, some people will defend Google no matter what they do. Just because someone claims that they're not evil, doesn't make it so. In fact, those that feel the need to constantly say "We're not evil" are *more* likely to be so. (It's like whenever you meet someone that says over and over, "I'm not a racist", nine times out of ten, they are a racist.)
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
In that case, I guess no one is too blame. The driver can't erase photos, and the programmer is probably just dumping them to the central website without noticing he's taken pictures of private property. As simple as it sounds, I have to agree.
Sometimes the simplest explanation works best.
You can sue the driver for no noticing your hints.
You can sue the map-maker for not clearly marking your road as private property.
You can even sue the map-making company for not checking all the (weeks of) footage, before sending it to Google.
You can even sue Google for not removing the footage, after you asked them to remove it.
But, NOT ASKING and then spamming for ATTENTION is a waste of everyone's time.
I'm not here to defend Google, but if someone is doing something you don't like, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Don't just whine about it to other people.
"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. It's the one thing I am indebted to her for."
Why do so many people keep saying that this is obvious, when it isn't? I am on a paved public road. I turn onto a gravel public road. Then I continue onto another paved road, which it turns out happens to be a private driveway. How is it at all obvious which, if any, of these transitions is the private/public line?
For the record, I know plenty of people whose homes have no driveway, with garages that open directly onto the street, or across a sidewalk onto the street, and front doors that open directly onto a sidewalk adjacent to the street with no private sidewalk approach.