Google uses public Wi-Fi data to pinpoint mobile users' location in concert with GPS and cell tower data, because no one method is perfectly reliable. The new policy comes in response to criticism and legal inquiries in Europe over Wi-Fi data collected by Google, particularly by its Street View cars. The opt-out will be available worldwide.

Google initially refused to hand that data over to German investigators, though the company eventually relented. Criticism of the policy spread around the world, eventually resulting in Google's discontinuation of Wi-Fi data collection by Street View vehicles.

In fact, co-founder Sergey Brin admitted that the level of data scraping was a mistake, saying that Google "screwed up." Today's policy change is another carefully worded admission that Google's previous policies on Wi-Fi data collection were too aggressive.

How do you feel about Google using Wi-Fi data for location services? Sound off in the comments

Starting today, you can tour sites like Rome's Colosseum and the Imperial Forum, the Thermae (Baths) of Diocletian, France's Chateau Fontainebleu, the French countryside, and much more.

The Colosseum in Rome

All the historic sites Google has on file are now listed in the Google Street View gallery, which includes more tours beyond just these new European additions. There are also sections dedicated to cultural sites around the world from UNESCO's World Heritage List, a list of famous landmarks, several popular U.S. highlights, the Hawaii beaches, the ski slopes at Whistler Blackcomb, South Africa's soccer stadiums and a tour of the seven continents.

What's interesting about these "non-street" Street View locales is how they were filmed. Traditionally, with Google Street View, cars with special cameras attached to their roofs drive around the city streets, recording images of the town.

But with these other types of tours, using cars and vans isn't possible. Instead, Google has outfitted a tricycle with camera equipment that lets it take pictures of places that are not accessible by automobile.

But the lawsuits continued. Now, however, a Berlin court has ruled definitively that, however odious the service may be to many, it is, in fact legal in Germany.

The woman who filed the suit maintained that the Google Street View cars, whose cameras are mounted at a height of almost nine feet, were high enough to see over the hedge in front of her family's house.

The court countered that the photos were taken from the street, not sidewalk, and that Germany has an opt-out rule for Street View that would mean her family's home would not appear online. (This does not address the apparent fact that some who had opted-out still saw their houses on Street View from certain angles.)

Due to the Berlin court being a terminal decision, there should be no more appeals, at least not for this case. The ruling is now a part of German legal precedent.

In related news, French courts have assessed a fine of 100,000 Euros (about $141,000) for Google's Street View activities in that country.

The project uses Picasa and App Engine to provide high rez scans of 1,000 prominent pieces of art. It uses Street View to bring viewers in the virtual doors of MoMA, the Hermitage, the Tate, the British National Gallery, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery, the Van Gogh Van Gogh Museum and others.

The samples seems to bridge an ocean of painting from European to Asian, modern to classical. The slideshow-style presentation seems a bit awkward, though the zoom is elegant.

As a website, apparently not an app so far, it doesn't rival Art Authority, which may be the gold standard for art history apps at this point, with over 40,000 images.

But the ability to navigate some of the world's most important museum makes the project exciting. Selecting a museum, you have the choice of viewing its art or taking the Street View-powered tour. The latter certainly helps to contextualize the former, at least in terms of understanding how we view art. "Visiting" the Frick, for instance, you can move about in the environment, pausing to click on the cross-shapes you see on paintings in order to view that painting outside Street View.

The video below is interesting particularly when it shows how they got the "Street View" shots. (With any luck they didn't capture Breugel's email along with his brush strokes.)

Google Earth provides a wealth of computer-generated building models, but Google notes that trees have been "rather hard to come by." In the service of boosting the realism substantially of the 3D world substantially, today's Google Earth release includes models for dozens of species of trees. Google says it's already "planted" over 80 million trees in Google Earth.

Street View isn't a new feature for Google Earth. It's been available since 2008. But the experience is now fully integrated, so you can zoom from the outer space view of Earth smoothly and seamlessly to your doorstep. Simply drag Pegman, the Street View mascot, onto any place where you see a blue highlighted road, an indication that Street View is available. And from there you can use the navigation controls to move around.

Like Street View, the availability of historical imagery via Google Earth isn't entirely new. But this release makes these images far easier to find. When you fly to an area where images are available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar. Clicking on it will transport you to that view, and you can browse through other images for that location.

Google's Street View project has raised a number of privacy concerns, most notably in May when the company announced that it had mistakenly included code in its Street View software that collected Wi-Fi payload data. Google halted the Wi-Fi data collection, but it was unclear if this was a permanent decision.

The report does add that "although it has no tracking tool to keep records of a customer's locations (and does not intend to create one), Google acknowledges that it does need to examine the potential privacy concerns of this method of collection."

Currently, Google's mobile privacy policy reads that "If you use location-enabled products and services, such as Google Maps for mobile, you may be sending us location information. This information may reveal your actual location, such as GPS data, or it may not, such as when you submit a partial address to look at a map of the area."

"With Android, location-sharing is opt-in," Google spokeswoman Christine Chen tells CNET. "Whether we're talking about location provider services or individual apps that use location, Android provides users with notice and control over collection of location, sharing of location and use of location to help provide a better mobile experience... We don't share individual location collected from user devices with any applications or services."

Today, the Canadian government found that the company had breached privacy laws.

According to the article, information included email addresses, user names, passwords, names and telephone numbers, addresses and even health details. Google has until February 1 to delete all of the information.

A report by Stoddart found that a Google engineer was responsible for the inadvertent collection of personal data when the engineer failed to follow company procedures involving legal review of code.

Germany's politicians have also seized upon this public opposition and held a high-level meeting in Berlin today to discuss potential regulations for geo-location services. The result of this discussion is that the German government will take a hands-off approach until the end of the year and allow the geo-location industry to self-regulate for now.

Google has added "Walking Navigation", a marriage of walking directions, turn-by-turn GPS navigation and satellite imagery, to the newest version of Google Maps for Android.

Simply enter the address of where you're trying to go, chose the "Walking" option from the navigation icon and the app will guide you, following along and vibrating when you reach the next turn. The map even rotates as you turn the phone, orienting the map to the direction you're facing. As Google engineers Andrey Ulanov and Kevin Law note in their blog post, you can "use it like a virtual compass with satellite imagery to look ahead or help pick out landmarks along the way."

If the satellite view doesn't offer enough in the way of contextual clues, the new and improved Street View navigation for Google Maps on Android should help. The feature brings street view straight to your phone and adds "smart navigation", wherein you can simply drag the "Pegman" around to move your vantage point. Take a look:

We often joke with friends about how the smartphone is like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's features like this that make that notion more and more a reality. It wasn't long ago that GPS navigation in a car seemed like a modern day luxury, and now we have access to turn-by-turn directions and imagery in our pockets. The integration with satellite imagery is just a step away from Street View integration and we can't imagine that an augmented reality addition is far off. While we often feel silly holding our phones up to the horizon to look for the nearest pizza joint, having this data on-screen as we navigate about our lives may prove even more handy.

What do you think - what's next for mobile personal navigation? That is, aside from getting similar functionality for the iPhone?

It's a little hard to describe, but check out the video below. In addition to being less disorienting than zooming around inside Street View, the open space opened up for annotation in Street Slide is very nice.

Doesn't that just make you feel like a whole new world of possibilities are opened up? There's no word whether or when this feature will be added to Bing, but if it is - I'm going to try to train myself to use Bing Maps instead of Google Maps.

Blogger Keir Clarke hacked together some proof of concept demos similar to this yesterday, using Google Maps, photoshop and jQuery. They're not bad for a few hours of work!

From these sorts of experiments to the work of Open Heat Map and Tableau that we've highlighted here, it's exciting to think about where all this malleability of maps could lead.

Google is clearly working hard on highlighting local businesses across its properties. Google Maps already shows the names of local businesses once you zoom in close enough, and last week Google announced Google Places, a new version of its Local Business Center, which allows local retailers and restaurants to claim and update their own listings. In addition, Google is also taking pictures of the in and outside of local businesses around the U.S.

Now, we've learned that Street View will also begin to feature user-submitted photographs. According to a recent Google Lat Long blog post, "We began integrating user photos into Street View last year. User photos allow you to view locations from entirely new perspectives, whether through the eyes of a talented photographer with a knack for capturing architectural detail, or simply taken from locations we couldn't get to... We're making it easier to navigate through these images in a way that should feel similar to how you're used to exploring within Street View."

And here is the photo navigation interface. Users can also navigate through photos using new click-and-drag controls to see images from nearby areas, or different angles or crops of the same area.

Some have speculated that Google has chosen to highlight and integrate this feature because of competition with Bing. The Next Web recently called Microsoft's Photosynth, a similar product launched in 2008 and integrated into Bing Maps, "the killer app of the Bing suite" that differentiates Bing from Google in a positive way.

"The feature," wrote Jacob Friedman , "displays collections of photos stitched together into a panorama[...] The results, to put it bluntly, can be spectacular."

While Google's offering may not have the 3D-esque quality of Photosynth, allowing for more creative images and photos from a larger geographical area to be shared in Street View is a smart move for the company. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Now, the company that has set out to digitize everything from ocean bottoms to outer space has received a warning from the European Union that it needs to do more to warn people before sending out cameras to record images for its popular Street View feature.

Special software blurs faces and license plates to help prevent identifying information from showing up on the site, which has been known to catch some embarrassing moments.

Already, the company has backed out of Greece and agreed to remove raw images of Germany. The EU cited "high standards for data protection" in its warning, saying that "all companies play according to the rules of the game."

According to The Telegraph, Google said it "would appeal the case, claiming the ruling was an attack on freedom of speech on the internet."

Update: We just received confirmation from an anonymous source that Google is indeed working on this project.

We just heard from a retailer in San Francisco that Google also photographed the inside of their store about 2 weeks ago - after seeking permission to do so, of course. According to our source, the Google employee used a "specialized camera which he rotated to take the 360 degree shot." In addition, he also took shots "looking out of the store as if exiting." This last part makes sense if Google wants to use this sequence of images to simulate the process of entering and exiting the store.

Of course, scaling up a program like this would be a lot harder to do than having a fleet of cars drive around the country and take photos in what is now a mostly automated process.

Here is the image that Search Engine Land received from the New York-based retailer:

Given that Google is already using its Street View trikes in parks, university campuses and zoos, locations like large malls would seem like a more reasonable area to expand Street View to first. Taking Street View indoors does make a lot of sense, however. Stores and malls are the obvious example that Google could monetize, but the company could also use the same technology in museums or public buildings.

The problem with these locations, though, is that Google can't rely solely on GPS to create these indoor views. Maybe that's why the company decided to work with smaller locations first to try out different methods for creating reliable indoor maps efficiently. It is worth noting that there are currently only a handful of mobile apps that offer indoor maps.

We asked Google for a comment about this rumor and will update the story once we hear back from them.

The patent describes a two-step process for identifying potential advertising real estate in these images. Google's software first identifies interest points in the image (e.g. the edges or corners of an object) and then generates features around these interest points. Google can then augment this region of the image with a link or replace a part of the current Street View image with a new image.

What Happens When Somebody Wants to Put a Virtual Ad on Your Real-Life Billboard?

One of the most interesting aspects of the patent can be found in the following paragraph:

The link can be associated with a property owner, for example the property owner which owns the physical property portrayed. The link can alternatively be associated with an advertiser who placed the highest bid on the image recognized within the region of interest (e.g., poster, billboard, banner, etc.). Any portion of the geographic display image in which the region of interest is located can be selectable (e.g., hot-linked). For example, the image of the coffee shop can be hot-linked to an advertisement for the coffee shop.

This does open up some interesting questions. It makes perfect sense for the owner of a local coffee shop to advertise through this system, but in this patent, Google also describes an advertising auction. Does that mean that a rival coffee shop could also bid for ad space on the virtual image of a competitor's store in Street View? Chances are this isn't quite what Google has in mind, though it could definitely be a possibility. Instead, it looks like Google could potentially identify some billboards and banners in Street View images and then replace these real-life billboards with virtual ads from the highest bidders. ]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_could_soon_augment_old_billboards_in_street.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_could_soon_augment_old_billboards_in_street.php News Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:45:28 -0800 Frederic Lardinois