image from Flags of the World
杉並区 (Suginami Ward), a suburb of Tokyo, Japan, has requested to have the Street View feature removed from Google Maps, according to Asahi Shimbun. The reason? Well, it's the same reason that North Oaks, Minnesota, wanted their images removed: privacy concerns.
It appears that Google is considering the removal of the images, and they might vanish from the map soon.
2 comments:
I wonder how many of Suginami Ward's citizens are aware that 90% of Tokyo, as well as other Japanese cities and suburbs are ALREADY photographed in 360-degree panoramic photos at a site that offers a similar service to Street View? It's called Location View, and it's in Japanese so I can't do a specific search for Suginami Ward - their mapping is rather difficult to navigate and since it's all in Japanese, I can't figure it out. And it doesn't work with Google or Babel Fish translators either.
Point is, if Google doesn't provide these panoramic mapping images, somebody else will or has already done so. I.e., Everyscape.com, mapjack.com, locaview.com and city8.com (for China), and those are only sites I know about. Pretty soon daum.net (I think it's called) will have some of Korea in a Street View-like service.
I often wonder if the problem is that it's an *American* company providing the imagery and that's what bothers some people for whatever reason, like the folks asking for the imagery ban in Germany and Switzerland. If privacy is really the issue, why is Location View allowed to keep the imagery in Tokyo? Or is their profile so low there not many know about it - as I suspect is the case with MapJack and EveryScape.
Probably the same reason that there was less security on the District of Columbia's coverage for EveryScape: Google is popular.
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