Google StreetView Is In Your Driveway

hermit_crab writes "Janet and George McKee are the neighbors of the Borings, who we discussed yesterday as the couple suing Google over StreetView. The McKees own a house that is featured in a much more intrusive set of Google StreetView images. 'The Google car continued past the steps leading to the McKees's front door and came to a stop outside the house's three-car garage (and next to the family's trampoline and portable basketball rim). Taking photos all the time, the Google vehicle was squarely on private property, a fact that presumably should have been apparent when the gravel path became paved.' Unlike the Borings, the McKees have not announced intentions to sue Google, nor have they requested to have the images removed."

Gravel! Turn back!

Taking photos all the time, the Google vehicle was squarely on private property, a fact that presumably should have been apparent when the gravel path became paved.

Why should that be apparent? There are gravel public lanes (and even a road or two) in my city, and it never would have occurred to me that such a thing would automatically mean private property.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Sure, I grew up on a gravel road, but my gravel public lanes never came complete with garage doors! [thesmokinggun.com].

They were clearly and undeniably in the couples' driveway [thesmokinggun.com].

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

It looked to me like the Google van turned down a side street and realized too late that it was a private driveway. By the time they had turned around and gone out to the main road, their van had already captured the pictures. What the operators should have done is to erase the last N seconds worth of pictures from street view, but for some reason they didn't (do they even have the capability?).

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Perhaps Google should be reviewing the photos before putting them on their website, instead of assuming that all pictures are OK.

It's pretty obvious that they were on someone's private driveway, and that they tried to turn around on someone's private property. Whoops, mistakes happen, but that's why you verify the results afterwards.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Obvious to you maybe after just read an article about it, but how obvious would it be to someone who just spent the past 7 hours staring at a slide show of strangers houses.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Google should then add a simple mechanism to the vans that allows the drivers to set a "last couple images are bad" marker. They turn into a driveway by accident or stop to refuel and as soon as they notice/are done, they press a button and the system sets a marker that tells the post-processing team that all images since the last turn are probably bad. The post-processing team can then just scan for those markers and closely examine the images preceding them; if the drivers pay a bit of attention that could cut down on images that shouldn't be in the database.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Sure, I grew up on a gravel road, but my gravel public lanes never came complete with garage doors! [thesmokinggun.com].

They were clearly and undeniably in the couples' driveway [thesmokinggun.com].

If it were a driveway, why would the city/county have given it a name?

I think there's a lot of deniability there.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Maybe they were lost. After all, it isn't as though they had access to any maps or anything.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Uh, all the time in my home town. Many roads were nothing more than cross cuts between fields or around farms, and short sections would be dirt, gravel, or paved. Many paved sections would have long runs where there were not lines painted on it. Some of these roads led to as few as 2 or 3 houses. Some to public parks. Some to the community running track and socker field. What was a road or a driveway was not clearly obvious.

Also, perhaps the driver was simply pulling up to see if there was part of the driveway to turn around in, without having to pitch a k-turn on a single lane gravel road in a big google van...

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

In fact if you pull up the GIS data (or googles maps which are based on city/county maps), the county road extends all the way to where the Google photographed. Just because they got a permit to pave a county road doesn't mean it isn't a county road anymore.

That they chose to put a trampoline and their house right up against it is irrelevant.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Just because a road is on the maps, does not make it a public road.

Around 1996 or so, maps of our county were updated using areal photography, among other means. Our driveway, which is clearly posted, gated, about 600 feet long, and looks like a public road from the air, showed up on the next edition of the county map. We contacted the correct parties, who apologized, explained that it was an error, and took our driveway off of subsequent versions of the map.

Another state in which we own property requires that shared driveways be named for 911 purposes. We own the road, our neighbors have an easement, and the road name is on file with the county, but that doesn't give anybody the right to drive down it without permission (by the way, it's clearly posted). We don't get any government funding to maintain it, although we do get a sign with the road name where it meets the county road. Such street signs are yellow (not green), and have the letters "PVT" in addition to the road name. It's understood that such roads are legally no different than driveways, in that if the road is posted, you can be charged with criminal trespass for driving on it.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Yes. Translation:

Normal Person: For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's Google's doing is trespassing.
./ know-it-all: But Google's got what nerds crave. It's got street view.
./ user #2: So wait a minute. What you're saying is, you don't think that Google should trespass?
Normal Person: Yes.
./ user #2: Not even on a 'private road'?
Normal Person: Well, I mean... A private road is a grey area maybe, but definitely not a driveway. But yeah, that's the idea.
./ know-it-all: But Google's got what nerds crave.
./ user #2: Yeah, it's got street view.
Normal Person: Okay, look. The people that live in at least one of these houses are complaining. Google seems to be trespassing. Other people seem to think so, too. So I'm pretty sure that this Google stuff's not working, at least not the way they are currently doing it. Now I'm no technologist, but I do know that if you put yourself on private property, it's called trespassing.
./ user #2: Well, people take pictures of my house, and I don't mind.
./ know-it-all: Hey, that's good! Are you a lawyer or something?!
Normal Person: Okay, look. You want to solve this problem, right? So why don't we just try to talk about it, okay, and not worry about what nerds crave?
./ user #2: But Google's GOT what nerds crave.
./ user #3: Yeah. It's got street view.
Normal Person: What ARE the legal implications of driving a van around people's yards to make something called "street view"? Do any of you even know?
./ know-it-all: It's what they do at Google.
Normal Person: Yeah, but WHY do they do this at Google?!
./ user #2: Cuz Google's got street view.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

As a former Google Street View driver, I can tell you that many, many public roads go from paved to gravel and gravel to paved. Sometimes there are signs. Sometimes you follow the GPS-based map data until you are in someone's backyard, looking at a pool. The camera is automatic, so the surprised driver can't really do anything about it but turn around and go. Other times you can follow the road right through what seems to be private property. Public maps generally aren't very good, and people's assumptions about how a stranger percieves the clues of what is and isn't public are often wildly wrong. I had a lot of interesting conversations with mildly surprised (usually happily surprised) people. One couple was originally a little taken aback when I pulled into their driveway and showed them that the map said it was a public road that went through (probably before their mobile home was parked there), but after seeing it for themselves they offered a glass of wine (turned down, thanks, 'cause I was driving) and generally laughed for as long as they were in my rear-view mirror. Street View will be full of those Easter eggs.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

>>>"The camera is automatic, so the surprised driver can't really do anything about it but turn around and go."

In that case, I guess no one is too blame. The driver can't erase photos, and the programmer is probably just dumping them to the central website without noticing he's taken pictures of private property.

As simple as it sounds, I have to agree.
Sometimes the simplest explanation works best.

You can sue the driver for no noticing your hints.
You can sue the map-maker for not clearly marking your road as private property.
You can even sue the map-making company for not checking all the (weeks of) footage, before sending it to Google.
You can even sue Google for not removing the footage, after you asked them to remove it.

But, NOT ASKING and then spamming for ATTENTION is a waste of everyone's time.

I'm not here to defend Google, but if someone is doing something you don't like, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Don't just whine about it to other people.

Re:Gravel! Turn back!

Q. Why are the Borings suing Google and not the van drivers who committed the trespass?

A. The van drivers are paid $7/hour and Google is worth $25 Billion.

Private means private.

They have no right to be on private property.

Re:Private means private.

1: it is assumed that a driveway can be reasonably used at will to turn a vehicle around.

2: tresspassing is not automatic. In most states even when properly posted, you can still go onto private land and go up to the front door. Even salesman can ring bells at homes posted no soliciting in SC. The onyl poewr you have is to ask them to leave. It only becomes tresspassing if they refuse to or if they return later. Neither of these conditions happened.

3: the proerty itself was not marked, posted, fenced with a gate, not in any other way abvious that is was private. I can't see in any of the pictures the van took where their so called private road sign exists, let alone complies with their state's laws concerning use of proper singage (including regionally accepted or universal images to assist those who can't read).

4: all they had to do was ask for the images to be removed.

5: the engineer in the vehicle has no control over the images being taken, not can he catalog or document them. This is ON PURPOSE to prevent tampering with the image feeds, and to keep the image recorder in sync with GPS information.

Looks like you need a robots.txt...

...for your driveway.

Re:Looks like you need a robots.txt...

In the real world, they're called "gates".

Intrusive???

Those are low-resolution photos of someone's driveway. Fume all your want, the outside of your house is not legally private. You may get upset by me standing on a public road and gawking at it for the whole day, but there is not anything you can do about that (unless I make any threatening comments about my future intent).

Did people forget how to buy curtains?

Re:Intrusive???

Well, from the way the images depict it, the "road" he was on was a single lane gravel road, that according to his GPS, the map for which is from local city assessors offices, that was in fact a road. When he realized it ended in a driveway, he likely though to turn around in the nice concrete pad where it was convenient instead of trying to mull an 95 point K-turn with a big van on gravel roads with no shoulders...

You likely would have done the same.

The driver has no control of the cameras in the vehicle. He could not turn them off to do this maneuver.

Opportunity

Dear Mr and Mrs McKee,

Your 15 minutes of fame are here. If you would like to capitalize on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I would suggest you contact our agency immediately. We have companies lined up, looking for advertising space, and if you act RIGHT NOW, we can offer you a lucrative advertising contract. We have excellent rates available for both rooftop and curtain based advertising.

Sincerely,
Marketing Scumbag

You really don't understand this issue.

More over; this still comes down to the basics of; "if you have nothing to hide, then what is the problem?"

If you don't understand why "if you have nothing to hide, then what is the problem?" is a problem, then you really don't understand this issue.

Re:"private road" signs?

From the fine article:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0407081google2.html [thesmokinggun.com]

I se no evidence of "private road" signs, nor do I see "no trespassing" signs. The house is certainly not visible from the main street, and it's not really visible where the "gravel" portion of the driveway becomes "concrete", which was supposed to be some big tipoff.

I fail to be impressed ... the Streetview driver drove down a named road marked on his map, which wasn't posted as private, wasn't obviously private, and ended up having to find a place to turn around at the end ... which just happened to be in the driveway of these homeowners. So what? As a homeowner myself, I hardly find this outrageous ... people turn around in my driveway all the time. And although Streetview has missed my house by a block, I'm not going to be outraged when they finally come back.

Re:"private road" signs?

Which is pretty much how I suspect this will break down.

Resident: You drove on my property!
Google: This county road?
Resident: That's my driveway!!!!
Google: Hold on while I get the county commisioner in on this.
Resident: NEVERMIND, HAVE A NICE DAY!!!!