The Wiki Man | 11 April 2009

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.

Obviously a few awkward scenes have emerged — one man photographed leaving a sex shop is clearly shown to be wearing a rucksack, something that could expose him to a lifetime’s ridicule in better circles.