wow!!

Tour the city on your screen
Google's Street View mixes maps with real images of Milwaukee
By BILL GLAUBER
bglauber@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Feb. 26, 2008
Google Street View is creepy.


And it's also highly addictive.

It's the latest local sensation from the online search colossus, a chance to view your neighborhood from ground-level.

Last year, Google began to roll this baby out for maps of San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami. Now, it's available for more than 30 cities, including Milwaukee, which was added to the system this month.

Through the magic of Google mapping, you can literally let your fingers do the walking around the Milwaukee metropolitan area using your computer keyboard to click your way to voyeuristic paradise as you check your house, your neighbor's house, and, let's admit it, your boss' home, too.

City assessors should love this.

At first, it feels kind of off-putting, invasive even.

This isn't a security camera in a shopping mall. It's real life, a community, maple trees, front lawns and mailboxes, all the stuff you can't really see in those satellite images that were all the rage 10 minutes ago.

According to a Google spokeswoman, imagery of Milwaukee and surrounding counties was gathered between a few months and around a year ago by vehicles driven on public streets and equipped with imaging technology.

So, that's how they mapped the area down to the last Milwaukee bungalow, give or take a couple of missed homes and streets.

If nothing else, Google is ruthlessly efficient in trying to live up to its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Shame how they went through the neighborhood on the day you left out the ugly green carpet for the trash haulers. Maybe they caught your husband walking down the street. Hey, it could be worse. There's one image circulating around the Web of a guy caught creeping away from an adult book store.

Privacy? Who said anything about privacy?

Chris Ahmuty, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, said his group doesn't have an official position on Street View, although he took a "test drive" to see what all the fuss was about.

"It doesn't appear as if there are images looking into people's picture windows or second-floor apartments," he said.

In a blog post last fall, Peter Fleischer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel, wrote: "In the US, there's a long and noble tradition of 'public spaces' where people don't have the same expectations of privacy as they do in their homes. This tradition helps protect journalists, for example. So we have been careful to only collect images that anyone could see walking down a public street."

Users can report objectionable imagery that includes nudity and certain types of locations, such as domestic violence shelters.

"We routinely review take down requests and act quickly to remove objectionable imagery," a Google spokeswoman said in an e-mail. "To date we have received very few imagery removal requests."

There is something compelling about Street View, sneaking a peek at the neighbor's home, checking out the other side of town.

It's a Sunday Drive without filling up a gas tank, a virtual tour of the real world.

Street View does offer a quick, often spectacular jaunt around the Milwaukee area. Want to take a spin on the outskirts of Miller Park? No problem. Just click away, although, prepare to be a little down in the dumps since the stadium was mapped on a cloudy day.

You can glimpse the top of the US Bank building. There's City Hall, under scaffolding (hope they come back for another photo session when the renovation is complete). And there's the Milwaukee Art Museum's Calatrava addition on a sunny, glorious day, truly a one-of-a-kind building.

Kind of makes you want to get out of the house and see the world.



-- Edited by JD The Jazz Doctor at 14:07, 2008-02-27