Slashdot Mirror
Angry Villagers Run Google Out of Town
Barence writes "A Google Street View car has been chased out of a British village by angry residents. The car was taking photographs of Broughton in Buckinghamshire for Google's when it was spotted by a local resident who warned the car not to enter the village then roused his neighbors, who surrounded the vehicle until the driver performed a U-turn and left. 'This is an affluent area,' protester Paul Jacobs said. 'We've already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it's an invitation for more criminals to strike. I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police.'"
The lack of respect being shown isn't for their 'wishes' it's a lack of respect for how they choose to enact the fullfillment of those wishes.
They were idiots, they may be normal people. That's OK, normal people can be idiots too. But they were idiots. A small group of people made a decision for the entire community. They probably broke the law by impeding traffic, and all for what? Because they didn't want their homes to show up on Google? They could have just logged in and actually indicated that.
It's not as if Google doesn't pull photos all the time from Streetview due to people requesting it.
And this BS about 'being worried this would attract burglers'. Come the eff on. No one but the locals knew about your place. And the locals already had plenty of ways of casing your joint without Google. In fact, the ones that were responsible for the six burglies in the article not only managed to do it without Google Streetview, but it's likely they got away with it right under the resident's nose.
But now, everyone in a huge radius knows that this place not only is an easy mark (after all they've been knocked over six times already) but there's still stuff left for the taking since people are paraniod about who is coming through.
Considering the explosion of surveillance in British cities, I'd think they've made it clear they don't expect any privacy in public. I fail to see how living in an "affluent area" allows you some extra privacy rights others do not have.
But hey, I guess rich people really feel like they're entitled to special treatment. You'd think having the money would be enough.
Speaking as someone who in a previous life committed a 'burg' or two, I can safely say that Google streetview is a fucking useless tool for burglary for a very simple reason, it shows only the visible parts of the property - the parts that are visible to anyone who walks past.
The last thing a burglar wants to do is to hang around on the most visible part of the property where anyone driving past can see them. Google street view provides a really slow, probably out of date and restricted way of doing the easiest part of a burglary, driving down the street and looking for a house to go into.
Seriously, it takes about two minutes to case a whole street in a car, but it takes about 15 minutes to do the same with Google. If someone is stupid enough to leave expensive items like jewelry or their PS3 on display in a window, then they're likely to get burgled by local feevs long before their photo pops up on Google.
Having said that, I could believe that 'steal-to-order' car thieves might find street view handy (car thieves already use tools like registration plate lookups to find a target), but home burglaries aren't lucrative enough to warrant a lot of preparation, especially when it doesn't seem like it would make home burglary any safer or significantly more profitable.
JK Rowling stole from me. She wrote her first book while claiming state benefits. Then when she got rich and famous, she ran off to the USA, so none of her taxes are going back in to top up that pot that she leeched from.