Did anyone else know that Nanaimo, a small town on Vancouver Island here in BC, is leading the world in getting its city mapped? Did you want to check out the downtown core in 3D, or see the exact lot size of a potential land purchase? It’s all available in Google Earth.
Privacy issues cannot be ignored here, particularly when the residents don’t seem to be aware of these things. But that’s the power of Google’s business approach. Until recent years there has been a lot of information publicly available, but nobody knew about it. Google lets its bots spider across all this data and mash it all into one place where suddenly people are sitting up and taking notice. I can do research on cemetery headstones in Nanaimo today from my desk. In the old days that would have been a trip to Nanaimo and some skulking about in the cemetery – all perfectly legal. But now that people can do it anonymously … it seems to have changed people’s opinion of the entire thing. Interesting.