Google Street View, what a fantastic tool

Nonsense. You can get more info walking past the house than you can on streetview. You want to go down the road of banning photos of public streets?

...no pun intended

Streetview has been active in the US for nearly a year and in that time, despite all the negative publicity it recieved at launch, there has been no massive increase in car crime, burglary, abdutions, sex attacks or any crime which could even remotely use Streetview as an intelligence gathering tool. Let's face it, as a tool it's not THAT useful. The most use I've been able to put it to it to get street-level images of locations in Key West for the story I'm writing. Sometimes I think it only gets stick because its now trendier to bash google than microsoft. If some small start-up company had launched this service, I doubt they would have even got a tenth of the criticism that the google got.

I found it very useful when I was looking for a house to buy, not to rob.

If I had the energy at half past midnight to respond more fully to the original poster, I would have said almost exactly what blaster said. I was irritated by the original poster's comments because it's clear to me that (if anything) Google Earth poses more of a threat than Streetview, because you can see angles on there that you can't see by walking down the street. I still think the benefits outweigh the risks though. What on earth do you think steetview gives criminals that they can't get wondering down the street? What are these 'dozen ways'? Do you really want to ban displaying photos of public places on the internet? Bye bye flickr, deviantart, facebook pics, etc, etc, etc. Think of the tourists getting arrested left, right and centre! Like Foster says, if anything, Streetview is a useful little service. Seeing what a meeting place - a bar for example - looks like so you don't wonder round for ages looking for it might be another advantage. If you are concerned about protecting your privacy, I would urge you to focus on genuine threats like centralised collection of searchable personal email and SMS content. Rant over.

Hey Brooosh, thanks for the reply. I did actually read your original post. The point I was making was that Streetview adds little or nothing to the information already available. It is therefore not a "fantastic tool for burglars, criminals of various types, stalkers, psychopaths etc". Ben

"They can use Street View to do an armchair reccy and identify easiest targets (i.e. most secluded, least overlooked, best access points) and Google Earth to see which are likely to have the largest, most accessible lead roofs." Have you actually used StreetView? Most of the best access points would not be visible from the road and therefore would not be available in streetview. Google is not the only netcompany which provides unfettered access to satellite imagery of towns and cities, so why pick on them? And streetview's coverage is hardly comprehensive, plus most of the imagery seems to be a year old at least in some cases. Hell, ebay and autotrader are much better source of information for car thieves. Using your train of thought, we should ban the internal combustion engine since it obviously provides bank robbers a convenient mode of escape. What about the battery, because without this, flashlights would be useless and would make night-time raids much more difficult. Maybe blacksmithing and metallurgy should be banned because they can make weapons which contribute to knife crime. Almost every technological innovation since the discovery of fire has made committing crimes easier.

Ok so to be clear, it seems from what you're saying that your concern is that street view makes the job of researching houses to burgle more convenient because it can be done from the armchair. That's a fair point. I balance that pro against these cons: - It's inferior information to what you would get if you just walked down the road and looked around. - All images are of public roads. The alternative would be banning the service which would have implications for capturing such images in other contexts. - It seems to me to be a useful service for the overwhelming majority of the population who are not criminals. - I don't have evidence for this but I'd guess that the vast, vast majority of 'Google-assisted crime' would be related to their search engine, but there are few people who would call for that to be shut down. - I looked at my borough of Haringey and it's all well out of date. A lot of those shops have been credit crunched now. "If you were in her position, I think you might see the threat in a slightly different light." If anyone were in anyone else's position, they'd see everything in a slightly different light. We're not going to agree and tbh other than a nice exercise in to-and-fro this isn't going to achieve anything, so I'm going to leave it at this, but would like to read any final thoughts you have. Ben PS I read back over the posts and notice I come across abrasive. I apologise for any comments where I may have appeared to be attacking you rather than commenting on your views on this subject. It's not what I would do to if we met in person so I should try harder not to do it online, I just find it hard to measure tone in writing sometimes. All was intended in good spirit. Cheers.

Great!