[HN Gopher] Street View turns 15
___________________________________________________________________
Street View turns 15
Author : HieronymusBosch
Score : 156 points
Date : 2022-05-24 08:49 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| leokennis wrote:
| If there's one product that showcases Google's strengths and
| Apple's weaknesses it's Street View.
|
| Google has mapped/streetviewed the world twice over, producing
| useful photo's that help in navigation. And now is building a new
| camera so they can map the Amazon as well.
|
| Meanwhile Apple is juuuuust about ready polishing and color
| grading their 20th run of 4K "Look Around" footage of 5th Avenue
| in New York, fingers crossed this time it will be production
| ready! You can expect footage of your medium-to-large city any
| decade now!
| givinguflac wrote:
| I live in a small town and look around on Apple Maps is
| everywhere. What's wrong with it in NY?
| amelius wrote:
| The initial iPhone was feature-poor, yet everybody seemed to
| love it (don't ask me why though).
| astrange wrote:
| Bold of you to claim that Gmaps is actually updated just
| because they say it is.
|
| Brisbane (the Australia one) has a 3D satellite map from 2010
| despite the 2022 copyright date on it. And if you walk along
| the street view images, it tends to tell you you're currently
| viewing the underground tunnel you're over rather than the
| surface street you're actually looking at, which is a funny
| bug.
| ezfe wrote:
| Look Around is available on 20% of earth (area, not population)
| - most extreme example I can find is the middle of Australia:
| https://i.imgur.com/ZHYbh58.png
|
| In the US, it's actually more limited than in other areas. It's
| certainly true that Google is ahead, sure - but Look Around
| isn't just 5th avenue of new york city.
|
| One area lookaround does best is spatial navigation. You can
| click on bridges, lanes, etc. to jump to them and the animation
| is MUCH smoother than Google Maps.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| You don't think the fact that Google Maps had a 10 year lead
| makes a difference?
| rob74 wrote:
| ...meanwhile, StreetView imagery for Germany has turned 14 - i.e.
| in much of Germany (major cities only), StreetView still shows
| the images from the original drive-through from 2008. After that
| (and a series of legal challenges which led to a ruling saying
| that buildings have to be blurred if one inhabitant objects to it
| being visible on StreetView), Google has apparently lost
| interest. The "3D buildings" feature, which is not affected by
| this ruling for some reason, gives a much better overview
| anyway...
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I like Street View and I use it regularly, but it's an
| interesting case of privacy vs speech/expression. I can see why
| the Germans might not want Google wandering around and
| aggregating pictures of all their homes.
| Aulig wrote:
| I don't think they've given up - I saw a streetview car driving
| through my village a couple weeks ago.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| They did give up. They are driving cars there for years but
| only to update street information, they are destroying the
| pictures taken.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Zoom out to an overview of Europe. Drag the street view-guy.
| Be amazed.
|
| My city's street view is gone, for one.
| tpm wrote:
| In Slovakia, the StreetView is quite up to date but curiously
| the satellite/airplane photos are about 10 years old and as a
| result, some neighbourhoods are hard to recognize.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Last summer in berlin I saw several 'streetview' like rigged
| cars, amongst them a Apple branded car with dslrs(!) mounted
| all around on a space frame... prolly autonomous driving
| tests though?
| Markoff wrote:
| it could be just cars checking paid parking, quite common
| in Prague, it looks like this here
|
| https://cdn.forbesmedia.cz/images/eyJ1IjoiXC91cGxvYWRzXC8yM
| D...
| derriz wrote:
| I'd love if they improved navigation while in Street View.
|
| It works okay when the geometry is simple - like on a long
| road/street with no junctions. But in more geometrically complex
| areas - for example, in urban settings around squares or on wide
| boulevards which have multiple paths - it's frustrating. Often I
| find the only way to move to where I want is by going back to the
| map view and clicking somewhere on a nearby blue line.
|
| Same in areas there are no roads/paths but have lots of user
| submitted panoramic photos - common in historical areas - for
| example around Roman/Greek/Egyption ruins - you have to go back
| to the map.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Incredible stuff. The various Google properties have performed an
| incredible objective of recording our history. One could imagine
| the ad supported empire as this personal consumption tax that
| funds human information recording. Glorious.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Street view is almost required when booking Airbnbs now. It's
| incredible how often the Airbnb photos look great and then you
| pull up street view and realize why the place was 20% cheaper
| than similar stays...
| colourgarden wrote:
| Surprised to see no mention of Geoguessr yet - awesome game and
| community built on top of Street View - https://www.geoguessr.com
| dang wrote:
| Discussed a long time ago:
|
| _GeoGuessr: Guess the location from Google street view_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5748923 - May 2013 (97
| comments)
|
| _Geoguessr_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5682367 -
| May 2013 (2 comments)
|
| _GeoGuessr: Let 's explore the world_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5572324 - April 2013 (2
| comments)
| xnorswap wrote:
| I love Geoguessr but it has a distinct randomisation problem
| (certainly in the competitive pool) that it hasn't solved.
|
| If you play regularly you'll begin to notice that around 1 in
| 10 cities are in fact Vienna.
|
| I'm not sure how it chooses, I suspect it first picks a
| country, then picks a city.
|
| Without weighting for population or other factors, you end up
| with a significant number of Taiwan, Singapore and Vienna, far
| more than their populations or areas should suggest.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| Which game mode are you playing where you have that issue?
| I've played countless hours of Geoguessr and haven't noticed
| that
| xnorswap wrote:
| The competitive mode in which you try to guess before your
| opponent, it's the standard mode now. (They've rebadged the
| old mode "geoguessr classic".)
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Man, since when did you have to make an account to use this
| site? I've played it before and this definitely is a new
| addition. I just simply refuse to make accounts for every
| little game I spend 5 min playing on the internet.
| OctopusLupid wrote:
| It's been there for quite some time. I believe the street
| view API is really not cheap for them to use, and the
| accounts are there to enforce the time limitation.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation. Guess
| it's been longer than I realized since I last played.
| NGRhodes wrote:
| Like Google search and maps, Street View quality seems focused on
| large towns, cities and areas of high population. I only live a
| few miles into a large rural area from one of UKs largest
| conurbations and our village is 13 years out of date for street
| view, and 9/10 years old for Satellite imagery. Google maps is
| missing most of the nearby small single track unpaved roads and
| about 75% of footpaths (all marked on definitive maps are public
| rights of way), its so bad there is a 2 mile long, 1 mile wide
| woods on the edge of our village that is completely missing
| (including the road and footpaths through it), there is just a
| big blank, yet Street View clearly shows the entrances and the
| woods behind.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Doesn't it make sense to you that such data collections would
| be population-weighted?
| danjc wrote:
| Last year I was living in a small village in the UK.
| Interestingly, street view for my street there was updated
| about 8 months ago so perhaps it will get to you!
| bombcar wrote:
| Our small town gets a "pass" every once in awhile (amusingly
| enough you can be on one side of the street and see the older
| view as it's clearly summer, the other side of the street is
| newer and you can see the new gas station in winter).
|
| I suspect that for smaller towns they have some sort of trigger
| based on things like new gas stations opening, etc, that causes
| a car to go by eventually.
| seydor wrote:
| Love streetview through a VR headset. So many empty museums to
| see, so many places to visit around the world, except Germany
| [deleted]
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Curious that no one else has mentioned what I find most addictive
| -- the unfiltered view of anthropology at street level spanning
| most of the world.
|
| Local fashion and architectural styles, history preserved or not,
| public safety infrastructure, private wealth versus public
| wealth, rule of law or local strong men, trust in law enforcement
| ... Clues everywhere, if you take the time to look.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I had a project collecting photos from street view.
|
| https://instagram.com/noplacetosit
|
| I stopped using insta because the format was wrong for this
| project. One day I'll make a dedicated website for it... one
| day.
| petee wrote:
| So does this mean they are going back and updating old imagery?
| My neighborhood (in a small city) hasn't been updated since 2011,
| and quite a few areas have street views that don't match reality
| anymore
| JamesAdir wrote:
| I think that's what they are doing with the live view street
| directions. They can easily recreate the new imagery based on
| the users photos.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| I very much doubt it. The entire point of that is to gauge
| the location of the user based on the existing street view
| imagery. Perhaps they'll add something eventually where users
| can contribute imagery from their phones, but I think that
| feature won't be the way to do it.
| bseidensticker wrote:
| They already have user contributed imagery. In parks,
| Google usually maps the paths but you can see dots off the
| paths for user added points.
| ollifi wrote:
| Looks like streetview of center of Helsinki was last updated
| 2009. Granted it's not very big either but capital of a
| european country still.
| masklinn wrote:
| That has been happening all along, but I would expect not
| everywhere.
| lionkor wrote:
| Looks extremely simple for anyone to do this for google now, so
| I'd guess yes
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I remember where I was when I first used streetview (and I have a
| generally bad memory for things that long ago). Was such an
| amazing feeling and a real living in the future kind if thing.
| More so than using an iPhone for the first time
| rob_c wrote:
| Great, now can we get it to scale with processing power. It was
| somehow more usable 10yr ago on most hardware...
| otras wrote:
| One of the neatest yet subtlest features in my experience is
| going back through time to see the streetview for a given
| position over time. It's especially interesting in Boston's
| Seaport or other areas that have seen a lot of development in the
| last ten years, where you can see the changes over time.
|
| I'm not sure where the option is on mobile (or if it's even
| available), but it's a great feature on desktop.
| april_22 wrote:
| It's been such an incredible discovery seeing what my
| neighborhood looked like in 2008. You can quite literally go
| back in time with this technology and it's nothing but
| astonishing.
| julianlam wrote:
| The blog post details that viewing historical images is now
| available on mobile
| otras wrote:
| Ah sorry I meant mobile web, where I had checked since I
| usually use desktop web. Thanks for calling that out!
| wnevets wrote:
| Thinking about driving without google maps sounds so stressful.
| Vladimof wrote:
| I strictly use OsmAnd~ on Android and it is a pain to use,
| specially in states where openstreetmap.org don't map street
| addresses like in Georgia. I often have to convert addresses to
| latitude/longitude first...
| ge96 wrote:
| This tech is amazing as far as the mapping effort in a random
| poor country like islands.
|
| I wonder if somewhere out there like a supercomputer they have a
| 1:1 mesh/depth map of the world ha as they've mapped it.
|
| On a side note I also applaud/miss their 360 photosphere app that
| tied in with the g cardboard.
| mrbonner wrote:
| It is interesting that there is a large number of consultants
| (I.e: low wage workers) working behind the scenes to support G
| Map [0]. Cognizant is their employer which is another surprise
| for me as I always thought it is an Indian company mainly employs
| people in India for outsourcing projects. The gas price is so
| ridiculously high in WA now that they are asking to postpone the
| RTO full time plan in June. I have switched to Apple Map since
| 2018 and still don't miss GMap.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/technology/google-maps-
| wo...
| advisedwang wrote:
| I'm curious if you've seen anything about Apple's equivalent.
| My impressions is basically every mass data set has an army of
| low paid workers somewhere, but maybe not and specifics are
| always interesting.
| rconti wrote:
| | high cost of housing in Bothell
|
| I've been away from the PNW for a long time, apparently.
|
| Reading further, one person spoke of a 70 mile commute from
| Olympia; another of 50 miles from Puyallup, and how they'd have
| to quit because they can't afford the commute.
|
| For those not from the area, they're commuting from one less-
| densely populated area, ACROSS a densely populated area, to
| another less-densely-populated area.
|
| Of course, we all have reasons to live where we live (family
| connections, other employed members of the household close to
| work, etc). But in this particular example, the commute has
| basically nothing to do with housing costs. If it was about
| costs, they could live more cheaply much closer to Bothell.
| It's all about commute choices.
| LeonM wrote:
| For those interested in the history of such software, I can
| recommend "The Billion Dollar code" on Netflix.
|
| It's the story about the team behind TerraVision, a predecessor
| of Google Maps.
|
| Though the story is not depicted completely accurate, it gives a
| great hacker vibe from the early days of computing. Can
| recommend.
| wfhordie wrote:
| Is Street View still illegal in Germany? Are there places in the
| world that haven't been co-opted by surveillance capitalists?
| april_22 wrote:
| Most major cities (where most of the population lives) have
| been mapped out.
| phatfish wrote:
| It's old data. But the 3D view from the plane cams is a good
| enough replacement at this point (where it is available), if
| you want a better view of an area than a satellite gives.
|
| Apart from just being nosey, i find street view helpful when
| driving to an address you don't know, for picking out
| landmarks etc. The 3D view just about makes up for the lack
| of street view in that regard.
| usr1106 wrote:
| I don't think that's a fully correct characterization. Those
| scenes that exist are still from 2008. They seem to have
| given up after the initial storm. And I'd not deem it
| completely out that another protest wave would start should
| they try again.
| usr1106 wrote:
| It has never been illegal. Public opinion against it was
| stronger than Google and they have obviously not dared to try
| again.
| upbeat_general wrote:
| I'm continually jealous of the street view dataset and
| disappointed there's no public/free alternative.
|
| They provide API access but it's very hamstrung and extremely
| expensive, making it essentially useless for anything except
| pulling up a single image of a location. It's useless for any
| real mapping/localization/analysis project.
| mvexel wrote:
| There's Mapillary (acquired by meta but imagery is free to use
| in most cases) and KartaView (Grab).
|
| Both are crowdsourced platforms.
|
| https://www.mapillary.com/ https://kartaview.org/landing
| Imnimo wrote:
| Sometimes I just load up google maps, drop the streetview pin in
| an arbitrary spot, and click around looking for something weird
| or interesting. I always wish they'd add more countries,
| especially in Asia and Africa but I'm sure the business case for
| "guy likes to idly click around and wants more countries" isn't
| very strong.
| foobarian wrote:
| I would kill for a driving simulator with streets and texture
| data from Street View!
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Microsoft Flight Simulator 2025: The One With The Ground
| Planes.
| mahathu wrote:
| if the Asian couple was always happy in their house why did they
| move out?
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Will they now allow mobile users to see older street view images?
| At the moment it's only possible to see this on desktop.
| ntauthority wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Starting today on Android and iOS globally, it's now easier
| than ever to travel back in time right from your phone.
|
| So yes, this is possible now.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| Now if only they could add that to the Desktop version of
| Google Earth, too...
|
| (Weirdly enough, historic _aerial_ imagery is _only_
| available in the desktop client. You can also look at
| _current_ street view images there, but for historic pictures
| you then always need to pull up the same location in the
| browser...)
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I think street view was one of the most audacious features I
| remember ever seeing in a product.
|
| I wish I knew the strategic and business analysis that was behind
| thinking up the feature, green lighting and funding it.
|
| I definitely did not have the foresight to see how street view
| could ever be worth the investment 15 years ago.
|
| Today I am more inclined to see the tremendous value of google
| maps as a whole.
| SuperQue wrote:
| Street views was actually started as a Stanford project called
| CityBlock.
|
| LOLOL, business analysis? The idea was entirely an engineering
| nerd project. We wanted to index the physical world, just like
| the book scanning project and a bunch of similar ideas.
|
| Source: I helped build one of the original street views vans as
| my 20% project.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| who was the berkeley guy at the corner of Kittredge with all
| the SSDs then?
| tucosan wrote:
| Prototyping and building this must have been a fun
| experience. It must be amazing to see a moonshot like this to
| become a real product that is used millions of people every
| day. I find street view to be tremendously helpful in many
| situations. It's a shame that my fellow German citizens are
| so scared of new tech, that Google had to stop indexing
| German streets.
| xargon7 wrote:
| It was an interesting mix of "let's do a cool thing" and
| "imagine what can be done with this data!" Early on someone
| mentioned that NYC doesn't actually know for sure where all
| of the fire hydrants are _actually_ placed, and it may be
| possible to automatically extract the locations from the
| collected data.
|
| More obviously, looking for the address signs of addresses
| that are expected along a street can dramatically improve
| driving directions.
|
| Of course, the biggest business value was being able to
| generate the actual, underlying street maps without having to
| purchase that from companies that had already digitized and
| driven the streets.
| o10449366 wrote:
| Digression, but this is my current complaint at my job at a
| Big Tech Company: we're now so big that we have product
| managers for everything that dictate what we can and can't
| work on and they hold a monopoly on customer data that's used
| to justify new product decisions. Engineers who have been
| around for years and started the product from the ground up,
| worked with customers to understand their needs, and have a
| good idea of what features may be valuable to them going
| forward are being ignored because now everything needs a
| business analyst to approve the idea.
|
| Some of the best products in the world came out of
| experimenting and just building something cool - I could
| never imagine many products that now support business
| analysts and product managers salaries getting the green
| light from them if they were pitched from scratch.
| [deleted]
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Street view has saved me quite a few times. Searching for a
| shop or office and being able to see what the front looks like
| when there's no signage.
| Seanambers wrote:
| Street view is an amazing product on its own. I've seen it
| used in all manner of instances from facility managers
| counting windows in order to write bids to sightseeing by
| people going on vacation to people checking where they need
| to go.
|
| Come to think of it, i've seen more professionals use it than
| anything else. The ability to go somewhere, without actually
| going there and actually see it is truly a asset.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It's astounding that surveillance advertising is so profitable
| that it can fund enterprises like this.
| astrange wrote:
| "Surveillance" isn't very profitable; Google ad targeting
| isn't even good and when it is good it doesn't need your
| data. (For instance, if you search for "buy ps5" they don't
| need a secret profile to show you ads for a PS5.)
|
| The reason their ads make infinite money is they're the best
| at serving them, they're vertically integrated, and their ad
| auction systems are set up to cheat in their favor.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > For instance, if you search for "buy ps5" they don't need
| a secret profile to show you ads for a PS5.
|
| Sorta. The real money is from competitors. How much would
| Microsoft spend to convince someone interested in a ps5 to
| to spend $500 on an xbox instead? Sony wouldn't spend as
| much as Microsoft here except to outbid them out of that
| ad.
|
| And you've just shown your hand at having $500 to dispose,
| maybe a local casino ad would fit well here?
|
| While the geographies of gaming consoles overlaps well, it
| doesn't for automobiles, restaurants, service providers
| (mechanics or dentists or whatever).
| phkahler wrote:
| >> The real money is from competitors.
|
| Yep:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=free+cad+software
| https://www.google.com/search?q=free+office+suite
|
| Asking for open source or GPL will usually get rid of the
| ads at the top. Companies can clearly pay to get results
| at the top that don't even fit your search terms.
| bseidensticker wrote:
| Ads must be relevant to be shown. The casino ad would
| probably not be shown at all, but even if it were they
| would have to pay more than Sony.
| est31 wrote:
| Targeting is only one of the reasons for the large amount
| of tracking that Google does. The second reason is
| conversion tracking, and that one's way more important to
| Google's customers. They do want to know that if you see a
| specific ad for a specific thing, whether you now buy it or
| not.
| pixl97 wrote:
| An attempt to answer the statement "I waste half my money
| advertising, problem is I don't know which half"
| nerdponx wrote:
| If that were true then they wouldn't collect it.
|
| It doesn't mean it's effective, but it's still clearly
| profitable.
| astrange wrote:
| I said "very profitable".
|
| "Surveillance capitalism" earns nothing compared to how
| much cash Apple makes, but there isn't a field of
| studying "cell phone capitalism".
| ethanbond wrote:
| There's plenty of study of the practice of one entity
| selling a good or service to another entity. You might
| call it "economics" or "business."
|
| "Surveillance capitalism" is interesting/unique because
| not all of the relevant parties in the exchange (users,
| platforms, advertisers) actually understand their role in
| the exchange.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Google started out collecting it with no idea what to do
| with it. User data was a waste product like gasoline was
| before someone invented a mass market car. Google figured
| out they could buy the then-leader in targeted
| advertising and apply their data to it when the tech
| market turned and investors suddenly started asking about
| business models.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Is that still the case? Do we know how much of Google's ad
| revenue is directly from their own search product?
| Obviously the genius of putting ads on a search engine is
| that it's a perfect fit: the users are literally typing in
| what they're interested in. But surely Google is also
| making big bucks now from ad products where this isn't the
| case (or is less so the case), like third-party web ads
| (AdSense) and mobile app ads (AdMob), as well as embedded
| ads in other Google products (like Gmail), and presumably
| those do rely heavily on tracking user behavior.
| transcriptase wrote:
| Then why do I have to sign off on 65 pages of "we collect
| every scrap of info about you short of sequencing your
| genome, and we would do that too if it weren't a logistical
| nightmare" every time I install a piece of software or buy
| a device with wifi capability? Someone ought to relay this
| insight to tech companies - it would save them a fortune.
| astrange wrote:
| Because their having your data is a liability for them,
| not an asset, which is why they want to offload some
| liability on you.
| pixl97 wrote:
| If it's a liability, where are the company ending fines
| and lawsuits?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| There aren't any because you signed the TOS. Many people
| have tried class actions about these things, but they
| never get anywhere meaningful. Europe is trying with GDPR
| to tip the balance back to the users, but the countries
| are stuck with massive backlogs that prevent progress.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| "Our company mission is to organize the world's information and
| make it universally accessible and useful. "
|
| -- seems very in line with mission of google -- take photos of
| everything so you could later run some (at the time OCR, now
| "ML") analysis over it & presents the information usefully --
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| Great projects that work come from tinkering, not strategic or
| business analysis. With business analysis you get stuff like
| Meta.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I doubt one would say Facebook or Oculus came out of
| "business analysis", right?
| HALtheWise wrote:
| Street view may be tricky to justify from a financial
| perspective, but it's pretty easy to justify from a _mission_
| perspective, which for Google is to "organize the world's
| information and make it universally accessible and useful". The
| mark of a good mission statement is that many seemingly
| unprofitable things that you do to pursue the mission end up
| paying dividends in the long term.
|
| I'm also not sure how expensive early street view actually was,
| does anyone know how many cars/drivers it takes?
| SuperQue wrote:
| We had 2 initial prototypes to index the bay area.
|
| I think there were maybe 10s of cars in the first big sweep
| over the US.
|
| I have no idea how many cars they're running these days.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > which for Google is to "organize the world's information
| and make it universally accessible and useful"
|
| Those missions statements always make me laugh. What if
| someone at Google found a great and cheap way to do that
| (organize the world's information blah blah blah) in a way
| that's unfortunately completely unmonetizable? Of course,
| Google would not implement it - and would patent the idea if
| possible, so that no one else can.
|
| The only true mission is to make as much money as possible.
| khazhoux wrote:
| But Street View itself is not monetized (not directly, and
| Maps itself is barely monetized). Street View proves your
| thesis wrong.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Given that one of the early team members was a world-famous
| wardriving expert and that the cars were initially
| "accidentally" scraping all open data transmissions they could
| find, the initial strategic/business analysis probably was some
| form of: what if we drove cars around that just physically
| scraped data from unsuspecting neighborhoods Wi-Fi networks for
| our advertising algorithms, and in exchange we'll make photos
| of those neighborhoods publicly available.
|
| Note that when the FCC investigated this practice they found
| that the data collection was definitely a deliberate design
| decision, which obviously makes sense given they moved Milner
| (creator of Netstumblr) over from YouTube to work on it.
|
| So yeah, it's just a fancy hacking project on wheels against
| unencrypted networks and with a corporate wrap on the car to
| support the ad network.
| [deleted]
| phphphphp wrote:
| I've heard this theory a few times but it doesn't sound very
| plausible: could you speak more to why you think the goal was
| always to mine wifi network information?
|
| We know that Google was doing that, but I thought it was an
| after thought associated with street view, not the motivation
| for street view.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Because why else would you do it?
| dspillett wrote:
| I doubt it was the only reason, a large part of the project
| IMO being a show of technical prowess, a "come and compete
| with us if you think you're hard enough" message, but I
| similarly doubt it was at all an afterthought.
|
| Location information is valuable for advertising and other
| uses, and if you combine many users turning GPS off to
| conserve battery1 when they didn't specifically need it,
| with cell-based location information not being particularly
| fine-grained[2][3], being able to track location by
| wireless AP proximity is a pretty valuable extra option. I
| expect there would have been a fair few people tasked with
| coming up with ideas for how to collect enough data for it
| to be a practical option4.
|
| [1] IIRC this was before easy controls to stop apps having
| access to location data if the hardware was turned on
|
| [2] in a crowded city you might be able to track someone to
| within less than half a mile, but elsewhere this potential
| error is much higher
|
| [3] or available at all due to reception issues
|
| [4] StreetView came before Android saw public release, so
| siphoning off location data from users of that OS would not
| have been an option that early, and even if it was would
| still rely on GPS use to make the data usefully accurate
| labcomputer wrote:
| Also, many devices didn't have built-in GPS (the original
| iPhone, for one), so how do you run location services?
|
| There were, at the time, several crowd-sourced sites of
| Wifi AP locations, which devices could use to estimate
| location from Wifi RSSI. So making a private,
| comprehensive database of the same is a pretty obvious
| task for a company that is either trying to catalog the
| world's information, or that wants to do something with
| location-based services on mobile devices in the future.
|
| Beyond that, getting an approximate location first is
| useful, even if you do plan to use GPS. It takes up to 30
| seconds to download the ephemeris for a GPS satellite
| over the air (assuming no uncorrectable errors), after
| first locking on to the frequency and PRN of each
| satellite. Cold-start times of 5 minutes under realistic
| urban conditions were not unusual. Do you want to wait 5
| minutes for the map to load on your phone?
|
| However, knowing your approximate location (from nearby
| APs) narrows the PRN and frequency search space (and you
| also know which satellites are above the horizon). With
| ephemeris data downloaded over the internet, every cold
| start can be as fast as a warm start: Just a couple
| seconds.
|
| There are plenty of reasons to think that Google intended
| to war drive from the beginning.
| mccorrinall wrote:
| I don't think they cared about unencrypted networks, but
| more about the ssid and macs of devices. Today they use Wi-
| Fi networks near you to determine your position when GPS is
| not available.
| ethanbond wrote:
| 1) What would be the rationale for such a project
| _otherwise_ , per GP?
|
| 2) What especially would be the rationale to put a
| wardriving expert on the project?
|
| "Data-hungry advertising network grows sensor array with
| cars" is far more believable to me than "data-hungry
| advertising network maps the world for free."
|
| Getting email address, CC info, passwords, names, Wi-Fi
| SSIDs, MAC addresses, etc all lined up with precise
| physical locations? That's of value to the company. Having
| pictures of houses? Not sure what value that has to the
| company, and if it had any it'll be similarly just an input
| into the same advertising algos.
| foobarian wrote:
| 1) The Google that built Street View is not the soul-
| less, profit-and-shareholder-value-optimizing enterprise
| it is today. There is no chance they would greenlight
| that project in 2022 if it didn't exist yet.
| ethanbond wrote:
| They just happened to have a wardriver on a project that
| looked an awful lot like wardriving?
| foobarian wrote:
| When you are doing an expensive operation such as putting
| a driver in the field traversing thousands of road miles,
| it makes sense to collect as much data as humanly
| possible from that platform instead of realizing later
| that there are certain things you wanted but can't repeat
| the driving easily. Or, you think of things to do with
| the data you never imagined before.
|
| The SSID collection only turned out controversial later,
| and they adjusted their data collection. I still don't
| really see a problem with it, TBH. You radiate into
| public space, you bear the consequences.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yes this does make sense if you are, at bottom, an
| advertising company... in need of data... In which case
| your "putting a driver in the field traversing thousands
| of road miles" is called "wardriving."
|
| Walmart's fleet, for example, drives 700 _million_ miles.
| How much data do you think they "accidentally" sniffed
| and recorded? I'll bet precisely zero bytes, because they
| are moving goods, and when that's a company's MO it makes
| no sense to have wardriving equipment or expertise
| involved.
| foobarian wrote:
| > How much data do you think they "accidentally" sniffed
| and recorded? I'll bet precisely zero bytes, because they
| are moving goods
|
| I'll bet dollars to donuts they track exactly where their
| vehicles go, and penalize drivers that exceed a certain
| deviation from the expected route/timing.
|
| Either way seem like perfectly legal things to do.
| peter422 wrote:
| This is a pretty insane conspiracy theory considering
| people happily give Google their CC (Google pay), emails
| (Gmail), physical address (maps), password (chrome), wifi
| info (android).
|
| It was just a mistake in a setting. They were
| accidentally capturing random packets, and of course you
| collect enough random packets and they will contain every
| conceivable type of data. It wasn't used for anything.
| It's not a conspiracy. They did street view to do street
| view, which is why they kept doing it for 12 years (and
| counting) after the packet collection was fixed.
| ethanbond wrote:
| The "insane conspiracy theory" is not that an ad network
| did everything it could to scrape more data for ads, lol.
| The insane conspiracy theory is that the ad network
| decided to photograph people's property because it's a
| nice thing to do.
|
| There's obviously all sorts of data that wardriving can
| pick up that none of those services could (even if they
| existed at the time, which most didn't). And obviously
| you or I have no clue what the data was used for. My
| guess is that, being a business, they used it for their
| core business, and your guess is that they spent
| exorbitant amounts of money to accumulate their pot of
| gold for... well no gosh darn reason.
|
| Now that Android exists, Google has pretty good reason to
| continue investing in mapping. But let's keep in mind
| that _Android_ also only exists to power the revenue-
| generating part of the business (ads). This isn't a
| critique of Google, this is how businesses work.
| [deleted]
| wongarsu wrote:
| I would have gone with "they mined wifi network information
| to use in Android's location system", but while the data
| was almost certainly used for that I'm not sure the
| timeline lines up for that to factor into greenlighting the
| project.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I will not be able to prove it to you, but your theory is
| incorrect. As stated elsewhere, the project was kickstarted
| at the height of the mid-2000s map-tech explosion, and it was
| a loss-leader much like Google Earth and Google Maps (which
| were barely monetized, even to this day).
|
| If nothing else, remember that in mid-2000s, Google was
| overflowing with cash and was growing rapidly. It was just
| beginning its transition from "search and only search" into
| apps (gmail, docs, etc) and mobile. Web ads were pouring in
| money at a rate hard to comprehend, and the "value" of SSIDs
| or whatever else you suggest were being farmed, was not even
| a rounding error.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| I remember in 2009 being part of an online community where I
| preferred to be anonymous and while reading a thread where people
| were sharing photos of sunsets, had the thought that eventually,
| there would be enough information out there that my precise
| location could automatically be determined based on me taking a
| picture looking out at the city from my balcony. That's a pretty
| creepy thought, and it seems that google is approaching it, given
| that they can have you point your camera "across the street" to
| determine your location from their glorgabytes of street view
| imagery.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| There's a fascinating technolibertarian metaverse dynamic to
| Minecraft anarchy servers, where gameplay is driven by an arms
| race of normalized cheating. Players are careful about what
| screenshots they share online, as this concern is the reality
| there. There's kind of a similarity to a future real reality
| where the entire Earth has been autonomously scanned: the
| terrain of the entire map of a Minecraft server is known to
| all, since the seed for procedural world generation can be
| reversed from nearby terrain, and reverse engineering of the
| world generation has resulted in several methods of determining
| in in-game coordinates of a player taking a screenshot (terms
| to search: trees, texture rotation, bedrock).
|
| Related are the impressive endeavours that determined the seed
| of the screenshot used in the game's splash screen and the seed
| of a 128px (tiny) screenshot used in the UI. The top comment of
| the first link explains it better than I could here:
|
| _Minecraft 's "Pack.png" Seed Reversal Methodology_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24621303 - 2020-09 (97
| comments)
|
| _Minecraft@Home_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23895789
| - 2020-07 (75 comments)
|
| There've also been few server exploits for locating other
| logged-on players:
|
| _Nocom - 2b2t Minecraft server exploit using Monte-Carlo
| localization_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29615428 -
| 2021-12 (80 comments)
|
| It's interesting how the anarchy server hacking scene is sort
| of like science, except with the god-like abilities of reverse-
| engineering the game's binaries.
|
| edit: fix cut off sentence
| arboles wrote:
| > technolibertarian metaverse dynamic
|
| What?
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Inspired by 1) an HN title claiming that Minecraft servers
| are the/a metaverse[0] and 2) the old Net philosophy of
| minimal regulation of technological advancement. Treating a
| server as a society, political and economic concepts apply
| quite well, including the advancement of the "technology"
| of gameplay: strategies, in-game inventions, client-side
| modding, etc. This applies to every game, but Minecraft in
| particular is known for its extensive unintentional
| emergent gameplay.
|
| And server owners--the government--typically draw some line
| before major glitches and definitely before blatant the
| cheating of server-side exploits, banning players who do
| not obey the rules. But the owner of an anarchy server
| explicitly does not do this, and instead treats any
| advancements in even cheating technology as legitimate in-
| game technology. Hence, a technolibertarian metaverse.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083271
| throw0101a wrote:
| > [...] _there would be enough information out there that my
| precise location could automatically be determined based on me
| taking a picture looking out at the city from my balcony._
|
| In Japan someone doxed a singer by zooming in on the
| reflections that were in her eyes from a selfie she took:
|
| > _A Japanese man accused of stalking and sexually assaulting a
| young pop star told police he located her through the
| reflection in her eyes in a picture, according to local media
| reports._
|
| * https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50000234
|
| * https://petapixel.com/2019/10/14/attacker-used-eye-
| reflectio...
|
| I'm curious to know what became of the case.
| astrange wrote:
| IIRC he was lying and it was actually in the EXIF data.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Cool. I guess something that 'mundane' didn't make as much
| of a splash as the initial report.
| masklinn wrote:
| Geoguessing has been going on for a while, and some people are
| _very_ good at it.
|
| One of the situations where it's deployed for the good of all
| is real estate: it's very common for brokers to hide the exact
| location for various reasons, but there are forums and
| individuals who from just a few pictures pointing outdoors and
| a rough location (e..g closest city) can very quickly find the
| exact location the picture was taken from.
|
| Super useful so you don't have to waste time visiting in order
| to find out that the house which looked good over the internet
| is sandwiched between a 6-lane highway and a pig farm, or is in
| a gated community, or can only be accessed through an easement.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Yes, I intentionally used the word "automatically" to my
| description, since it's very obvious to me that it's already
| often doable if a human is willing to engage their brain and
| do research. Whenever I use airbnb, I make a game out of
| finding the actual addresses of the places I'm considering
| based on clues I can see in the photos and approximate maps
| on the site.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| I also find locating images an interesting skill to
| develop. I originally only wanted to mention
| https://old.reddit.com/r/picturegame,* which I find more
| "organic" than Geoguessr: players submit single images,
| which are identified using whatever means are available. It
| has a quirk in that often people submit images found
| online, which must be obfuscated to prevent trivial reverse
| image searching. A randomly transformed translucent mask is
| recommended, but those are still relatively easily
| reversed! I haven't tried, though--maybe there's greater
| difficult than at first apparent.
|
| * It turns out, after an HN search, that this is a more
| common organized activity than I'd thought; this thread
| lists several other communities:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692172
| iggldiggl wrote:
| I've been doing something like this privately for my own
| picture library - because my backlog of pictures-to-be-
| geotagged is about 15 years, I don't necessarily remember
| all the details where exactly a picture was taken. Of
| course I could just drop the location marker in roughly
| the right location and call it a day, but pinpointing the
| location as accurately as possible is usually too
| tempting.
| bombcar wrote:
| People have triangulated down to the exact apartment balcony
| from a picture taken from it, multiple times. Google maps helps
| in that it allows someone not from the area to do it, but it's
| always been possible if there's enough information available in
| the picture (building skyline is the main one).
| heleninboodler wrote:
| The key thing I was talking about was the difference between
| it being possible to deduce the location with enough effort
| and it simply being automatic. Google has automated it in one
| specific scenario, which is that you are looking at something
| which is substantially covered by street view imagery taken
| from a similar vantage point.
| sangnoir wrote:
| >...there would be enough information out there that my precise
| location could automatically be determined based on me taking a
| picture looking out at the city from my balcony.
|
| Not yet automatic, but the folk at Bellingcat are impressive at
| figuring out location from pictures and videos (manually, I
| assume).
| bamboozled wrote:
| Does anyone actually use street view for anything but novel
| purposes? I've used it maybe 5 times when I couldn't find the
| place I was looking for using the standard map view; However in
| nearly all cases, resorting to StreetView meant the place I was
| looking for was gone anyway.
| maccard wrote:
| Not too long ago I had a leak that I suspected the previous
| owner had repaired. I was able to confirm with street view
| pictures that it's been repaired and patched over at least
| three separate times since 2008!
| dwater wrote:
| Yes, almost daily. When I'm going somewhere new, what does the
| front of the building look like? Where is there parking? How do
| I access the parking? What are the parking fees and
| restrictions? How visible is a landmark from the street? Which
| street is the entrance on? And that's just when I'm planning a
| trip, one of many use cases.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I recently used it and its 12 years of history to demonstrate
| to a commission of the City of Berkeley that the same handful
| of cars were perpetually parked in free, no-time-limit street
| parking spaces which local merchants incorrectly believed were
| useful to their customers. This is good data that can change
| outcomes for city planning and regulation.
| LancerSykera wrote:
| It was helpful in my truck driving days when going to customers
| I'd never been to before, and it was absolutely a daily tool in
| telecom construction/maintenance.
|
| Example - random sheriff's office calls in a phone line ripped
| down when I've got one foot out the door for the day. I pulled
| up the address on Streetview while she was explaining the scene
| to me, and it sure looked like coax on that side of the street,
| our lines were on the other side. Sure enough, 45 minute drive
| later I called the sheriff and told them to call the cable
| company.
|
| When you cover an area hundreds of square miles you can't go
| look at every job before sending a crew out. Pull it up on
| Streetview, even if the images are 10 years old it's probably
| still the same.
| upbeat_general wrote:
| Yes, all the time. Before going to a place to see parking, how
| it looks, etc
| microtherion wrote:
| I often use it with family members who lack the confidence to
| find a location that they need to get to, and the skill to read
| conventional maps. "Walking off" the route in StreetView
| beforehand is nearly 100% successful.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I wonder how much Streetview has changed the shape of buying real
| estate remote. Used to be a time you couldn't just see the
| history of a neighborhood and condition of an area over time.
| bombcar wrote:
| It definitely helps get a "feel" for the neighborhood but it
| can often be out of date.
|
| I've noticed some real estate listings now include drone shots,
| perhaps to compensate.
| april_22 wrote:
| Dang, I've actually never thought about this but it is such a
| powerful tool for checking how the neighborhood looked like
| before.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-24 23:01 UTC)