A new report shows that the Indian government refused to have their streets covered by the Google Street View.
Street View is a venture by Google, which allows for them to have Indian cities, tourist spots, hills, and rivers all packed in one application which users can control using the 360-degree imagery that will also be made panoramic and street level. The option would also be available in the museums, arenas, restaurants, and small businesses.
Google Street View was started back in 2007 as Google felt that users deserved feet on the ground experience and also instant access to all the places and landmarks one might want to see. At first, the service was launched in five cities in the US. The service grew and by 2010 it was being introduced in Antarctica. This was highly welcome because it gave users a chance to navigate through the mountains, all the icebergs located in Antarctica and they could even locate some Penguin colonies which were all caught on the Google cameras.
Users could do all this without needing to leave the house. Since the Antarctica launch, the service has been growing rapidly and now covers at least 65 countries and more after having traveled seven million plus miles.
Rio de Janeiro was the latest city to be mapped by the Street View team, as the company prepared for the 2016 Olympics Games, which millions of people are expected to come for. More than 200 hotels, restaurants, and bars imagery have been collected by the Google Street View team. It gives users a chance to look at all the places they want to visit before they actually visit them.
But, besides all that good news and “noble” plans, the Google Street View venture has always been shrouded in controversy. Several reports in the Western media showed that users were concerned about the privacy and security ramifications of the expansion of the venture. Many people thought that the taking of pictures of people’s homes was an unwanted act of intrusion. Google has also been accused of collecting Wifi data as their Street View trucks continue to move around the countries.
Google has been experiencing great difficulty in expanding its services in other countries, though. The privacy laws in the EU and the various cultural norms are different from those that are in the US. Even though the Street View cars were obliged to blur the images of the houses they see on the roads. In Germany, in particular, they had to blur the images and notify the people of the length of time they were going to blur the images.
The company then started to expand into India through the Bengaluru city, after which they received a letter which prohibited them from getting data from the city. The letter cited security reasons as the reason for the company to stop their operations.
