Google's vehicle used for its Street View service sighted in London
If you see this vehicle around London be sure to run after it. Google is using it to make the 'Street View' of London. That way you can guarantee that you will appear in as many pictures as possible.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's Street View launched in the US earlier in 2007, and the company pre-empted the obvious privacy backlash by announcing in August that it would blur faces and license plates automatically in the imagery. A capture vehicle now operating in London signals the service's first push beyond American streets.
The timing matters: the sighting comes days after a $5 billion lawsuit was filed against Google over privacy violations, so any expansion of street-level photography lands in an already heated privacy climate.
First-order effects
- Londoners on public streets are being photographed at scale for inclusion in Street View, with Google's automated face and plate blurring as the stated safeguard before publication.
- Google gains first-mover position in UK street-level imagery, extending its Maps lead into a market no rival has yet covered with its own fleet.
Second-order effects
- European privacy advocates and regulators get a concrete target: a foreign company photographing identifiable people and property, which raises the odds of formal scrutiny of how the imagery is collected and blurred.
- Mapping competitors face pressure to decide whether to fund their own capture fleets or cede the street-level layer to Google, since licensing this imagery from a rival is not a realistic option.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, street-level photography becomes a standing data-collection operation rather than a one-off project — fleets continuously re-shooting cities — which would entrench whoever owns the capture infrastructure and force privacy law to grapple with systematic public-space imaging rather than isolated photographs.
The trend: Street-level imagery is turning maps from static diagrams into continuously updated photographic databases, with privacy safeguards and regulation racing to catch up to the capture fleets.