What to do when the camera adds a tonne

DEAR Google, 

I’m writing to demand a re-take. Your Street View of my house makes it look fat.

I’m not sure what your Street View photographer was smoking when he passed by my humble drive in Lynn Valley, North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, North America, the World. But I can’t say I blame him for not paying full attention. His has to be a terribly boring job, driving by house after house on street after street with a spheroid digital camera strapped to the hood of Google’s Street View vehicle. His assignment? Capturing 360 degree horizontal and 290 degree vertical panoramas, just so we can all look up our own pads on the Internet.

The photographer’s ennui is apparent when you get to the view of my address. Not only does my semi-detached appear out of shape, hirsute and hung over in your Street View, it’s the only one on the block with empty garbage and recycling cans strewn all over the front yard. Nice, Google. Maybe I could come over to your house and take a picture of you with your pants down.

Thanks, too, for capturing the image of a visiting car whose driver my husband Stanley doesn’t recognize. A vainglorious technogeek, Stanley likes nothing better than looking for references to himself online. So he had some tough questions when he found our domicile on Street View -- questions that I won’t be able to fob off forever. Luckily, your software blurs the license plates of vehicles. Google, think of the marriages you’ve already saved by not completely invading our privacy.

Faces of passers-by are also fuzzed on Street View. I pray that this means Stanley won’t spot those out-of-town competitors from the World Fire Games peering out our bedroom window.

Can you believe that some people haven’t heard of Street View, Google? You introduced it to the U.S. in 2007 with a handful of cities represented. Now we North Americans can simply call up Google Street View on the Internet, find our own neighbourhoods -- or the neighbourhoods we’re interested in “exploring” -- and click on an icon to navigate their nooks and crannies. How thrilling it is to realize that, even without a driver’s license, we can now cruise the mean streets of Cleveland using only one wisened hand.

Mind you, it’s a disappointment that the Street View action isn’t live -- yet. At this point, only still photographs help interested parties scope out which local front window will be easiest to smash in later. Alternatively, we can see whether a particular strip club routinely has lineups, or what people tend to get up to on the corner of Hastings and Main. What we can’t see are U.S. military bases. Uncle Sam doesn’t want you, Google. :(

But what did the rest of us ever do without you? Rely on common sense, or the element of surprise? Let’s say I was going to Paris, France, and wanted to anticipate what the Eiffel Tower looked like so I didn’t wander straight past it by accident. In the olden days, I guess I’d just have gone there and started looking around, without knowing if the tower was round, square, or what.

Those times are laughably out of date, thanks to Street View.

Google, it seems strange that not everybody appreciates your improvements. In wacky old England, residents of Broughton, Buckinghamshire were so outraged by the idea of burglars combing Street View for local prospects that they formed a human barrier to block your vehicle. I wonder if you showed the villagers’ torches on Broughton Street Views. No wonder TechDigest’s online article on the debacle asked rhetorically, “Does the village of Broughton have something to hide?”

Speaking of hiding things, however, it seems unfair that you pick and choose what to hide and what to show. Another Street View dissenter celebrated the imminent arrival of your overhead camera by painting a 60-foot phallus on the roof of his parents’ stately home. Why did Street View have to blot out that educational vista?

No such luck for my place, where the trash cans on the front lawn might as well be a vast heap of soiled skivvies. I’m not the only person to complain that your photographs don’t do me proud -- I’m not even the only columnist. You may not know that one Les MacPherson bellyached in print last March that you had hit Saskatoon at a particularly homely period, post-winter but nowhere near approaching spring.

“For Google to record its images of the city at this most visually unappealing time of year is like photographing a beautiful woman who has just awakened from a six-month coma,” he griped in a town rag. While some Canadians might argue that Saskatoon has no flattering angles, in or out of a coma, those who have actually been there apparently disagree.

Your fans, however, include one artist who uses Street View as a tool. Kentucky’s Bill Guffey scopes out its most picturesque scenes and commits them to canvas. “I git on Street View almost every day, and I find something every day that I want to paint,” he told ABC News in February. I tell you what, Google, his art ain’t bad -- see www.bnguffey.com.

I’ve figured out where you got the idea for Street View. I, too, remember a time when visitors to L.A. would shell out their dineros for printed maps of celebrities’ homes. On the website Virtual Globetrotting, we can still find aerial views of the properties of the famous people we most admire -- the ones with whom we share a “special” bond, even though we haven’t “met” them, per se.

 We can have a gander, for instance, at Bill Gates’ house in Medina, Washington; the late Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch; the U.S. Vice President’s House at One Observatory Circle in Washington, D.C. All we have to do is name what we want to see in your famous search box, and we can pinpoint where it is, no matter how creepy our intentions.

You democrats at Google, however, don’t want our voyeurism confined to the lavish spreads of the rich, the good-looking and the powerful. Hence, my protest -- I didn’t sign up for this perpetual worldwide open house. So just give me a month to squeeze my home into a girdle and get my lawn exfoliated and waxed. You line up Annie Leibovitz. Then you can come back for a proper shoot. I promise to stay well inside.

 

 

 

Comments

[Kate Zimmerman]

Ditto.

[Account Deleted]

It's great to see you've "transformered" your scribbles into a TECH BLOG, Kate.

I rank you right up there with Pogue and AmberMac.