Google Street View went live in Australia the other day. When they first launched this last year in the States, it was just a handful of intersections in major cities, and I thought “lame” and went back to snowboarding with Samuel L. Jackson.

It’s only just now that I’ve discovered that Street View in Australia (and presumably, for some time, in the United States) actually has hundreds of thousands of photos from virtually every street in the country, from the esplanades of Sydney to the remote desert highways of the Northern Territory. Notable absentees are Kalgoorlie and most of the Top End, including Darwin. Nonetheless, this is fucking amazing.

Here’s my house!

OH MY FUCKING GOD PRIVACY BREACH!!!!!!!!!!!!

My car isn’t there, so I must be somewhere out and about. It’s not parked on the edge of the road outside Warwick Train Station either, so I can’t be at university. I’m probably at work – but Google was FUCKING LAZY and didn’t bother to do every carpark in the country as well as every road, so we’ll never know for sure. I’m out there somewhere in that frozen moment of time. Judging from petrol prices, that frozen moment was quite some time ago – last year at least:

THIS IS A HEINOUS BREACH OF BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS THAT CANNOT GO UNCHALLENGED

At the same time it can’t be any earlier than about October or November, when I was driving to work and saw a group of people on the side of the road clustered around a guy who’d taken a spill on his motorcycle, and who later died.

momentarily refraining from the joke because i suspect putting this image up breaches good taste already

Here’s the driveway where, in mid-2004, I had an accident of my own and could easily have died. I used to ride my bike at top speed down the footpath on this hill every day on the way home from school, despite Chris’ warnings that a car could back out of a driveway and I’d run right into it. As it turned out, he was right, and one afternoon I woke up lying on the verge of this house with a broken arm. I note that they still haven’t trimmed that view-obscuring hedge.

JOIN ME BROTHERS AND WE WILL STORM THE GOOGLEPLEX! THE STREETS SHALL RUN RED WITH BLOOD!

I think this is an awesome little toy. If you had decent broadband and mountains of spare time you could take a virtual roadtrip from one side of the country to the other. In fact, sooner or later I expect to see a blog doing just that, as dull as stretches of it might be…

DEATH TO THE INFIDELS!

There’s the usual hysterical panic from the tinfoil hat brigade, who claim that it’s a breach of privacy to be able to see a photos of people walking down the street, or the outside of somebody’s house. Whatever. Here’s a news flash: when you’re in public, people can see you!

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