Planet Google by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

American astronaut Bill Anders’s photos of the earth, taken in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, had vividly shown earth’s inhabitants how small a place the planet seemed when framed against the void. Now, Google Earth made the planet seem even smaller, a place where we are all virtual neighbors, separated by only a few mouse clicks. Robert M. Samborski, executive director of the Geospatial Information and Technology Association, a trade organization, said in 2006, only a year after the release of Google Maps and Google Earth, that “Google’s done more to raise the awareness of using maps than the industry’s been able to do in the past twenty-five years.”

Google Earth also drew attention for its utility in less serious pursuits. Oddities turned up among its images. The Badlands Guardian, for example, a natural geologic formation near Alberta, Canada, was often visited by online aviators. It resembles a human head, wearing Native American headdress—and also appears to be naturally adorned with iPod-like earbuds that hang down—on a scale that makes the figures on Mount Rushmore look like miniatures. One could also pay an overhead visit to the Arizona farmer who carved a giant portrait of Oprah Winfrey across ten acres of cropland, or to the forty-year-old barracks complex at a U.S. Navy base near San Diego that, from an aerial view, resembled a swastika.

Sky in Google Earth, introduced in 2007, allows viewers to look upward and travel to individual stars (100 million) and distant galaxies (200 million). Attention could also be redirected back down to earth to a more familiar group of stars, found in Hollywood and its vicinity. Fans with no official connection to Google added home listings for Tom Cruise, Halle Berry, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, and other film notables. Software that could be used for such breathtakingly disparate purposes, high and low—with the power to send a traveler either to the farthest edge of the known universe or to hover above Jim Carrey’s estate—makes anywhere and everywhere appear accessible. The natural corollary, which was not fully appreciated at first, was that soon every nonfamous person in the universe will be accessible to everyone else.

Shortly after John Hanke joined Google, he began to hear the first rumblings of the general public’s uneasiness about satellite images breaching the privacy of individuals. Hanke attempted to allay concerns by explaining that the satellite images that Google used were generally six to twelve months old. Users could not swoop down and spy on a neighbor’s back yard in real time. Nor was the resolution of the photographs sufficient to permit a Google user to pick out any meaningful details. He added reassuringly: “It’s not like you are going to be able to read a license plate on a car or see what an individual was doing when a particular image was taken.”

Strictly speaking, Hanke was correct: the resolution of the commercially available satellite imagery at that time was insufficient to portray clearly objects that were smaller than two feet. The resolution was improving rapidly, however.

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