Google's watching....not big brother!

According to CNN Google will begin offering a new map service to rival and surpass Mapquest. They bought this service from Keyhole, a company with a large repository of satellite pictures of people’s houses. Some people are protesting this from a privacy point of view. I don’t see why they are protesting. It’s not as though I can pull up a live picture from your house. All I can do is see a picture that was taken at some point in the past (Google claims 6 months). I don’t see how that’s a privacy issue? Right now I could pay someone to go take pictures of your house and you probably wouldn’t know. As long as they aren’t tracking people or anything (something nearly impossible with civilian satellites), it’s not a big deal. If you look at the CNN articles you will see from the pictures that the resolution isn’t all that. It’s more of a cool geek thing than anything else. Actually, the article did mention the only good use I can see for this service, checking to see just how far that hotel is from the beach when they claim they are just “minutes away from the water”. Actually, I can think of one other thing. If you are trying to figure out which houses to visit with your realtor, you can look it up on Google and see just how big the yard is, front property, etc.

• Google
• Keyhole