The Wiki Man

Rory Sutherland

Tuesday, 7th April 2009

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

I had been expecting it for weeks: the announcement of the first Google Street View divorce. A lawyer speaking anonymously to the Sun now claims to have been briefed to start proceedings after his client was browsing the Google site and spotted her husband’s car parked outside another woman’s house. Although the Street View software automatically blurs car number-plates (as well as most human faces), the lawyer believes the photograph offers sufficient proof of identity since the man had customised his Range Rover with distinctive wheel trim (grounds enough in itself, you’d think).

If you have never used Google Street View, you can take a look at the Spectator’s front door here — http://snipr.com/f3zqh — in a picture which suggests that staff at the Speccie could step up their recycling efforts, but otherwise reveals a surprising absence of debauchery. This and a few million other house-fronts have been photographed by special Google vehicles which ply the streets of major British cities panoramically scanning the buildings — the 21st-century equivalent of those cameras once (still?) used for school photographs where one pupil would scurry round the back of the line-up in mid-exposure so as to appear at both ends of the photograph, thereby achieving a quick burst of kudos and a lifelong reputation as a wag.

To make one thing clear: these are not live photographs, so you can’t sit at a computer and wait for someone to leave their house. It is a huge patchwork of photographs, mostly taken last summer, forming a tapestry of British street scenes, a kind of Domesday Book for 2008.

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Alex

April 8th, 2009 6:14pm Report this comment

That 'Google divorce' has already been exposed as a hoax:

http://www.anorak.co.uk/media/205773.html

Rory Sutherland

April 11th, 2009 10:39pm Report this comment

I had picked up suspicions of the Sun's story from Anorak before I wrote my piece. However soon afterwards The Times printed a similar (the same?) story from a named lawyer, and so I assumed there had to be some foundation behind the thing. Now I'm not so sure.

It's certainly true that Google Street View images aren't date-stamped so, unless you are one hell of an astronomer, I can quite see how you would know the exact date at which the picture was taken.

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