Google Maps Street View Reaches Singapore

It’s a little scary if you think about it, seeing a photo shot of your home on Google Maps, closed up enough to make out the furniture inside your living room. It’s the Street View in Google Maps. Street View has been available in other parts of the world. In addition to satellite view (i.e. view from the sky) of any area on planet earth, Street View provides a street level view of some parts of the world. It’s basically a view of the surroundings as if you were standing on a point on any point of the road in the covered areas.

Street View has been available in some parts of the world, notably the US. It wasn’t available for Singapore, until now. It’s pretty useful actually. When I travelled to the US some time ago and wanted to check out the vicinity of hotels that I was considering to book myself in, I used Street View to help myself. It’s really cool for scouting an area to know more about it.

Of course, there are lots of privacy concerns surrounding it and there have been much objections about it when Street View was introduced in various countries/areas. Now that it has hit Singapore, I think our countrymen here will have similar complaints.

Just for my own interest, I explored the vicinity of our “sensitive installations”, like army camps and air bases. You know, these “protected places” are sensitive enough that members of the public are not allowed to loiter outside their perimeter, much less take photos even from the outside. Yes, Street View has provided beautiful footage of entire areas where photography is not allowed. How wonderful for the arm-chair terrorist. (Of course, if our military security depended on the lack of photographic surveillance from our enemies, then we are doomed anyway.)

The photos from our Street View are really good quality. Probably Google has gotten better camera hardware since their spy-vehicles first rolled out.

If you have a house too near a road… better be careful what you do. You could be on candid camera Google Maps.