Deja Vu: Google Maps Street View = Privacy Concern, (free) GPS, (free) Video Camera
Google released Street View feature in Google Maps yesterday. Luckily(or unluckily depending your view), the street I live on is covered by Street View on Google Maps.
The street view is stunningly realistic, and it's pretty easy to navigate. The first time I used it, the movie "Deja Vu" came to my mind right away. It's like the movie scene where police were looking at the past through lots of videos.
Compared to what I saw in Street View yesterday, I saw my neighbor opening the door of his car in Street View today!
According to O'reilly Radar, "Google partners with Immersive Media, a company that has an eleven lens camera capable of taking full, high-res video while driving along city streets. Each captured pixel is geotagged and primed for consumer use".
Given that videos are taken continuously through cameras attached to cars(or Google's Street crawlers), this raises the priacy concerns whether you(or your property, your cars, etc) want to should be included in Street View or not.
so we have a story like this: Google Maps is spying on my cat, says freaked out BB reader. The 4th comment of this story has an interesting picture which shows a sign in front of a hotel to ask not to be included in Street View.
On the flip side, if you are the owner of a local businese, you probably want your storefront to standout more in Street View. Or if you are in the market for buying a house, you can just check out Street View to get a sense about the neighborhood.
So what does Google Map Street View have to do with free GPS and video camera?
Here's my bold prediction: Google will give out GPS and video camera for free in exchange for you to allow Google to use videos and geo. data captured freely.
Maybe it's not going to be entirely free. Google will come out with a tiered plan such that you pay less and less when you share more and more data. What Google really cares about its Street View coverage, not so much about how frequent it gets updated(once a day is probably fine).
Once you car is networked, Google can geo-target ads to you based on the location information determined by GPS.
No matter what, Google just wants data about you and serve more-targeted ads to you!
