So it's past midnight and Google Street View for the UK has just gone live!

Give it a go here :-http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q

Type in your address. Drag the little yellow man to your road and have a look what your house looks like.

Enjoy!

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” T.E. Lawrence.

Extraordinary. I am sitting in my cabin on the Maersk Dover looking at my front door. Pan up and down the street and I can see my car. Swivel round through 360 degrees and look at the grass bank on the other side of the road. Angle up and look at the top floors on the house. As you say, magic, and perhaps a tad perturbing.

Great stuff. I`ve been up and down my street and round the front and back garden. These images were taken on a Friday last Summer, due to rubbish bags around, plus our cherry tree in full bloom. Just like magic.

I really do not see the signal.

Excellent, trying to spot myself at the mo !!

Magic indeed, but am I the only one to feel a little uncomfortable with this?

Bern

Incredable - I can see my business sign in my garden and zoom in to read it!!

Last edited at 8:36am on 11/03/10 by BarryW

Great stuff, but cannot get into the back garden.

Cool

www.homestead.com/askjeane

the whole thing give me the creeps, too many cameras around by far.

if they helped to reduce crime i would be more likely to be in favour.

this has come up before, but why worry, you can only see things from the street that you can see anyway (will help me investigate my postcards).

What is more of the worry and it has been available for years are birds eye views where you can see gardens etc that you wouldn't usually see (though you can from Dover from the various hills anyway)

Depends what you get up to in the back garden Scotchie. I'm either playing with the dog, cutting the grass, or sitting reading a good book with a glass of something elkaholic and of course, my ciggies.

Sid, I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but to put a serious spin on it, it really should not matter what you get up to in your own garden, you should be able to get up to it without worrying about it ending up on f*****g Google! I think that this system is atrocious and also highly useless. I am not happy that my house is on Google like this.

It's a false argument to suggest that it's just stuff you can see anyway. So are car number plates, children's faces, and corporate adverts, but these things generally have to be edited off / pixellated when PUBLISHED without the relevant consent / release documents being signed or approved. Who the hell approved Google to publish very detailed images of my home online? I sure didn't.

We have CCTV everywhere but CCTV officers have to operate with certain restrictions in place in the realm of private dwellings. I have seen this with my own eyes in the local office, their CCTV cameras are obscured if they point at private dwellings so that the operator cannot possibly zoom into any windows. Looking at the Google street view, I was able to easily see into MANY windows, some in great detail. Surely this cannot be right?

Furthermore, what the hell use is this thing? I don't consider myself "fuddy duddy" as I am a champion of the world wide web, I have always believed in it and I love it. I use the web for just about everything. But why would I want to wander down suburbs peering into windows and gardens? Google Street View is just high tech voyeurism that has no practical application that I can think of unless you are either a very bored individual who never, ever goes out or a terrorist wanting some simple armchair reconnaissance.

Google have yet again taken our privacy and taken a huge shit on it from a great height, like they always do.

I haven't found any info on this website about Street View yet (I dare say it will arrive) but this website is worth a look:
www.google-watch.org

Bern