#Live satellite imaging license
But systematic surveillance rather than incidental is far easier with an identifier like a license plate. Of course, one may say that here is a small red car that was on 4th, and is on 5th a minute later - probably the same. License plates are likewise obscured so that neither cars nor people can be easily tracked from image to image. To that end, Nexar’s systems carefully detect and blur out faces before any images are exposed to public view. Setting aside the greater argument of the right to privacy in public places and attendant philosophical problems, it’s simply the ethical thing to do to minimize how much you expose people who don’t know they’re being photographed. As mentioned before it’s a serious question of privacy to have constantly updating, public-facing imagery of every major street of a major city. Of course, construction signs and traffic jams aren’t the only things on the road. It’s for telling what’s in the road, not for zooming in to spot a street address.
Naturally it’s not in 360 and high definition - these are forward-facing cameras with decent but not impressive resolution. This all goes into the database, which gets updated any time a car with a Nexar node goes by. The service uses computer vision algorithms to identify a number of features, including signs (permanent and temporary), obstructions, even the status of traffic lights. (Europe, unfortunately, may be waiting a while, though the company says it’s GDPR-compliant.) but wants to do a slower roll-out to identify issues and opportunities. Right now it’s limited to a web interface, and to New York City - the company has enough data to launch in several other areas in the U.S. You can also select the time of day, letting you rewind a few minutes or a few days - what was it like during that parade? Or after the game? Are there a lot of people there late at night? And so on. Where something like Google Maps or Waze may say that there’s an accident at this intersection, or construction causing traffic, Nexar’s map will show the locations of the orange cones to within a few feet, or how far into the lanes that fender-bender protrudes. And the nature of the data makes for extremely granular information. Zooming in on a hexagonal map section, which the company has dubbed “nexagons,” polls the service to find everything the service knows about that area. But it helps to see what the product looks like in action before addressing that. But knowing where someone or some car was a year or two ago is one thing knowing where they were five minutes ago is another entirely.įortunately, from what I’ve heard, this issue was front of mind for the team from the start. Google has shown that properly handled, this kind of imagery can be useful and only minimally invasive. The team saw the community they’d enabled trading videos and sharing data derived by automatic analysis of their imagery, and, according to co-founder and CTO Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, asked themselves: Why shouldn’t this data be available to the public as well?Īctually there are a few reasons - privacy chief among them.