The Googlization of Everything

Well, clear practical purpose aside, street view is just fun. I remember playing with it when it was first unveiled and having a great time. I remember how great it was when Street View first became available for someplace I had actually lived. Cruising up and down the streets, following the routes I had walked every day, looking to see if maybe I could be spotted somewhere among all those people (I never found myself, but I wouldn't have minded if I had). It was a blast to play with.

But, of course, there are major privacy concerns, so some real uses beyond just having fun would be helpful. So I've got a couple to offer as food for thought. I won't weigh in on whether they are significant enough to justify the risk to privacy, because I'm really pretty ambivalent on the issue. But there are several that spring to mind quickly.

1) Finding where you're going. Maps, of course, are our primary tool for helping us find out way around unfamiliar places. If there's a specific spot -- say, a restaurant -- that I want to go to, I'll pop on over to Google Maps, or Mapquest, or whatever, give them my starting and ending locations, and get door-to-door driving directions. But driving directions can only take you so far. Driving to an unfamiliar place, it can be difficult to keep track of where you are on a map. Online directions don't give you much in the way of landmarks. So if I wanted to go someplace in an unfamiliar city, it might well behoove me to take a look at the Street View for that area, look at the storefronts or buildings before and after the place I was going, look for landmarks. Heck, if I was especially concerned and ambitious, I might use Street View to practice driving where I was going. (I should note that I've never done this, because I've never thought of it, but I may well try it in future.) Or, maybe I've just got directions to the restaurant itself, but don't know where to put my car. I could save a lot of time by using Street View to see whether there's street parking in the area or to look around for nearby parking lots, things that aren't clearly shown by traditional maps or even GPSes.

2) Research. Let's say I'm writing a book that takes place in a city I can't visit often. Or I'm trying better to understand the events in a news story about someplace I've never been. Even if it's a well-photographed city, it's going to be a lot of work to piece together the views I need to visualize a scene. A lot of trips to the library, a lot of image searches. And there just may not be enough photos to get a real sense of the area, or I may not be able to understand how they all fit together. Street View will let me go down a street, look at what's around me, and see how it all fits together, helping me achieve greater veracity in my descriptions or understand the criminal's flight path better.

3) History. This is closely related to the previous point, but takes into account that the data is probably being archived. Understanding what a place was like in the past is difficult. We rely on historical maps, on a limited number of photographs and postcards and videos. In the same way Street View is helpful to contemporary people trying to understand a place better, that data, if archived and made available to researchers, will give future researchers the tools to understand the spaces of their past better. Indeed, assuming the Street View data is updated periodically, an archive spanning years could provide a powerful and otherwise practically unattainable look at how a place evolved and changed.

So while none of this contradicts the privacy concerns, I do think there are clear uses for Street View, and that no technology not roughly equivalent could fill the same needs.

I still can't see a real-life purpose or justification for Street View.

I think its insanely useful when you use it in conjunction with getting directions to somewhere you have never been before. A top-down map and sat picture can only tell so much. I like to use street view to know, for instance, what the storefront I am going to looks like, so I can more readily identify it when I drive by.

Additionally, it is occasionally useful at work. Part of my practice as a lawyer is defending bus accident cases, and its always better to know what the accident site looks like. Street view lets me check it out without having to leave my office.

I used it last week.

"There's that restaurant. I don't remember its name. I think it's on the block with that other place. Here, let me pull up Street View."

"Oh, yeah, Mai House! I've been there."

Have you ever tried using Street View to find a business? Practically useless. You spend more time dragging the camera up and down the street than you would just going there in person and looking with your eyes. The only real use cases for Street View involve voyeurism or stalking. Fortunately there is a simple fix for Street View's privacy bugs.

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