Google deletes Maps satellite photos of 14-year-old's unsolved murder Google has said it is acting quickly to remove distressing images on Google Maps, after the family of a murdered 14-year-old saw his body on the system's satellite photos. Kevin Barrera was shot to death on the way home from school in San Francisco's East Bay area in August 2009. Last week his family was alerted to the Maps …
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"CCTV's on every corner"
In fairness, while CCTV doesn't directly make you safer necessarily, it does help secure conviction against criminals, which indirectly drives down crime in the long run (or at least, pushes it into non-CCTV covered areas where it is "safer" to make a living as a criminal)
In fairness, while CCTV doesn't directly make you safer necessarily, it does help secure conviction against criminals, which indirectly drives down crime in the long run
What a load of rubbish. Any convictions it secures are negated by the fact that the sentancing is a joke and more and more serious crimes are seeing jail time served reducing rather than increasing caused by amongst other things overcrowded jails. Crime isn't been driven down the jails are overcrowded and the government statistics misleading and that's before you take into account the amount of people who feel it's not worth the stress or hassle to push for a conviction because they are being made to feel like the villain by the likes of the police
Here is a thought...with marijuana now being legal in several states including California where this Google image occurred, why not release all the prisoners that are serving time on marijuana charges based on what the current laws are. In other words what ever is legal now with regards to marijuana but was not years ago and those that are serving jail time with charges from those years back but would not be in jail today with the new laws, could and should be released. I'm sure this would free up plenty of space for jail cells that are needed for more devious, violent crimes. This would also save tax payer money, provide more man power to police better and much more. Example: Let's say someone is currently serving years in jail for having a small amount of marijuana that is today is legal & would not get jail time. Why keep that person in jail over old laws? Release these prisoners allowing more jail space for people that commit more serious crimes.
Believe me when I tell you that in most cases the footage from CCTV is too poor an image to use to convict anyone. In others, the "chain of custody" for the video images is questioned and the video gets thrown out of court.
Far too many people have the "CSI syndrome" where they think you can say "Enhance" and see something usable at 100x digital zoom. Digital Zooming reduces the number of usable pixels down to almost nothing. 1/100 of nothing is less than nothing. Facial recognition software is one of the most farcical con jobs ever perpetrated on government and it does not work reliably unless the picture is head on from 3 m or less. You might be able to determine race, height (if there is a measureable reference in the shot), clothing, general appearance, but almost never will you get absolute proof of identity. The higher the camera is mounted the less likely you are to see anything of value. If the camera is perpendicular to the subject you have a far greater possibility of identification but then the camera can be easily vandalized.
You cell phone camera sensor is better than most CCTV cameras and you know how good a cell phone zooms (not very).
Those of you who give up your Liberty to gain a false sense of Security soon have neither.
' I guess for yanks it's like that with murders. "Oh damn, really must remember to tell the police I saw that guy get shot. Nah, forget it, I'm sure the guy was standing his ground".'
Nice generalization. We have one of our own; the British are friendly and honorable people. I am glad to see that at least one of you have proven that it is indeed a generalization.
After googleing the image I think it is completely possible to figure out what is going on, an obvious police car parked up, a couple of people in dark matching tops, trousers and hats a few meters away from the car in a group, (uniforms considering the proximity of the police car) some of them looking towards another person with the same dark matching uniform standing a few meters away facing a figure in non matching lighter coloured clothing lying sprawled awkwardly on the ground, in the next image from a different angle the person looking at the figure on the ground is now walking away towards the car leaving the figure in the same position.
It is your right to be paranoid if you so desire, but if you post something on this site you might want to first see if it passes the "Is this technologically achievable?" test.
Let's say you wanted to spy on everyone in the US. The surface area of the US is 9.827 million km². If we assume that each satellite used has a previously unheard of resolution camera that makes it possible to identify individuals when focussed on an entire square kilometer of surface, then only some 9.8 million satellites will be required. Assuming economies of scale, the cost of building and launching a single satellite could possibly be brought down to $100 million.
(Let's ignore running costs, or the time taken to launch almost ten million satellites.)
So far, the total cost of universal satellite surveillance looks to be around the $10,000,000,000,000.
That's ten trillion dollars
Now think about the data transmission bandwidth required to transmit that information from each satellite. In order to recognise people (who presumably spend most of their time looking up at the sky) you would want a resolution of at least 1 million pixels per square metre of observed surface (probably a lot more, but let's be generous). That's 1000 x 1000 x 1000000 pixels. Per frame. Let's be generous and assume monochrome with only 256 levels of greyscale. If the satellite interprets real time loosely, and only takes one snap per second, that's still 1 TB/second. That's pretty ambitious. Current state of the art is probably exemplified by the MUOS satellite, built by Lockheed Martin, that can transmit 348 kilobytes per second.
OK, so maybe they solve that with some amazing new laser comms device for satellites. One that has around 10 million satellites shining lasers at the ground. Seems reasonable. What do we do with all that data? We now have to store data that increased at the rate of 10 million TB / second.
Time to buy shares in Western Digital, I think.
Good points. I do satellite image analysis as part of my research, and most satellite data are used (panchromatic) at 1m resolution (these are often down-sampled to 2m to reduce the compute and storage load by a factor of four). To process the entire land surface of the world (150 Tpixel at 1m, give or take) in a week is quite a challenge, logistically and computationally. The new generation of satellites can give 30cm resolution, so roughly ten times more data: 1.5 Exapixel (ouch). Recognizing anybody at 30 cm resolution is impossible. Better resolution may be available in military satellites, but normally higher resolution work is done by aerial imaging.
What I do not understand in Google's reaction is why they do not apply some simple morphological filters to the image patch to remove the details. This is quite easy and fast. Using simple area-open-close, or levelling from markers you could remove the small features on the road without affecting the rest. Alternatively, edit out the data manually, and use image inpainting to stitch up the hole.
Why should they be forced to remove a picture of something in the public domain taken by them from something in the public domain and displayed on a website in the public domain unless somebody directly involved in the incident has made a valid request?
Why?
Careful for what you wish for, the Internet is full, and rightly so, of content gathered by people and shown. Probably 90% of it offends somebody working at the Daily Mail and they'll think it should be taken down.
It's strange they haven't removed that one. They removed this one pretty quickly after it was reported:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/12/street_view_ontario/
I remember seeing one when they launched one of the South American countries, too (possibly Honduras).
I was born in Oakland, but my family and I lived in Richmond back in the late 1940's until we moved to Nebraska in 1951. I feel for this family - losing a son at such an age is a tragedy. That the police have not found the perpetrators of this crime is a travesty of justice. I agree with the victim's father that the Richmond police should make sure that this case does not go unclosed much longer.
"perhaps if they hadn't made a big issue of it with the press"
People should read these articles properly before commenting. It was the press who alerted the family to the image. Excerpt from the article:
"Last week his family was alerted to the Maps search result by local TV station KTVU: its reporters found the overhead pictures showed Kevin's body, a police patrol car, and what appears to be officers examining the scene."
Google never finish what they promise when starting projects.
Google Earth was supposed to map the earth, and then update these images every 3-4 years, well Philippines has never been completed, about 1/3 has been done, and most of these images are 10 to 13 years old.
Now with all these terrible tragedies happening here, there are no maps of roads systems we can use, as they have never been mapped, They did update 3 sections after the recent typhoon, but two sections were of a different island which was not badly damaged, it was seriously over exposed and the majority of it was the ocean. Totally useless.
But how many times has the US been scanned??
And Bing maps are even less apparent....
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