Look Up Your Home Now Using Google's Street View
Some time in the past year, Google sent their camera vans to Chino Hills to photograph every street. When you see a blue outline on their maps, it means that you can use street view and actually see pictures of the homes, parks, and other scenery on that street. You might even see yourself.
The vans haven't covered every street, but they've covered a lot of them. Google is in the process of building this photographic database all around the country. To allay privacy concerns, they say that the camera vans only go to public places, but the practice is not without controversy. Earlier this year, a major military base in Houston raised objections to the vans coming on their base. For national security reasons, they requested that the pictures be taken down. Google complied.
Wired.com has a site that has requested the oddest scenes captured on the Google street view maps. There have been pictures of people kissing, breaking into buildings, going into adult bookstores, and actually even more unsavory actions for public places. Some of these people have asked for images to be removed.
I'm not sure that private citizens will get the same cooperation as the military but the site does have a link where people can request that inappropriate scenes be removed. I"m sure that there will be many issues to be hashed out over time.
But for now, ready or not, it is likely that a picture of your home is now a part of the Google database.
To see it in action, go to www.ChinoHills.com/gmaps .
and is not a part of nor affiliated with the City of Chino Hills.