Google Street View creepy

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Last Wednesday, Google Street View became available in Canada, but only a select 11 cities have been uploaded.

The concept of Street View is to be able to see a pictorial representation of buildings, houses, parks and other public spaces on the Google Map application by dragging the small yellow man in the left hand corner onto the area you want to see.

This function has been available in other countries already; however, Google has faced much controversy in what should and should not be photographed.

Private outdoor spaces and gated communities felt outraged at the availability of their guarded properties online. Others were photographed without their faces blurred leaving strip clubs or other secretive places.

While Google has implemented some rules to ensure privacy is maintained, the general purpose to Google Street View comes into question.

This new application straddles the bridge between a novel time-waster and inappropriate surveillance tool; without much obvious purpose at the moment, it has to be asked why we are letting a company invade spaces that do not need to be accessed by millions online?

People have been finding houses for centuries without the help of Google Street View and although it may be helpful to the curious, it just pushes the line of where it becomes acceptable to impede on peoples privacy.


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