Google brings Street View back to India following 2016 ban

Google has brought its Street View service – which offers photographs of most locations on Google Maps – back to India, six years after the nation rejected it as an invasion of privacy and a threat to national security. India blocked Street View in 2016 due to national security authorities feeling that freely available …

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

It's so much easier...

It's so much easier to bribe grease things in India when you go through a local partner rather than run the same operation yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's so much easier...

Sounds more like the Indian government doesn't want you to know how filthy their people are until after you've spent the dosh going there. There are a lot more low caste people than high, and live up to it. Or down, rather.

[katrinab]

Re: It's so much easier...

Well you have plausible deniability that way. They can claim that they had no idea their local partner was doing this terrible thing and they are completely shocked, and they have taken immediate decisive action by writing a letter to them expressing their displeasure.

[david 12]

Re: It's so much easier...

Yes. Kind of like the USA, Europe, China, or the Pacific nations.

[EricB123]

Re: It's so much easier...

How many of these photos have Modi's picture in them?

[Version 1.0]

Go Ogle street view

If Google is showing you data like these images then Google is recording your viewing and selling your interests to others - this is just the way the world works.

[Anonymous Coward]

tweak traffic light timings LOL

Anyone who has ever driven in India knows that traffic lights are purely for decoration. It's laughable to think that changing the timings will have any effect on anything.

[david 12]

Re: tweak traffic light timings LOL

Is this technology in use in the USA? If not, why not?

I keep waiting for the 'driverless car' technology to make it to intersections. If cars can recognize cars and pedestrians, why can't traffic lights? Why aren't we seeing reports about that?

[EricB123]

Re: tweak traffic light timings LOL

Did India ever implement traffic lights that refuse to turn green if every car honks?

[WhereAmI?]

Re: tweak traffic light timings LOL

A properly-configured traffic intersection reports back to the central city-wide computer which then tweaks timings based on the flow and weight of traffic. Some systems will even switch a central lane to be one-way in the morning and the other way in the evening (the Mersey tunnel for example; I created the operations GUI for that one in a programming language called Cyrus*, so I was quite familiar with it). If a junction is not centrally controlled then it can only adjust the timings for that junction based on the traffic flow though it. Yeah - I spent fifteen years designing traffic systems. It's one of those jobs that you just don't tell people what you do because it's guaranteed to get your eardrums ruptured.

As for all that honking of horns in India: it's not hot-tempered drivers. They're used as a warning that someone is about to overtake you or, if up on some of the seriously narrow roads in the Himalayas, to let you know that someone is coming the other way round the blind bend you're just approaching. 'Narrow' is an understatement. I watched a very battered bus belonging to the Himachal Pradesh Transport Corporation negotiate one of those bends with the rear left wheel hanging in midair over a *very* long drop and that was a scheduled service!

*Cyrus. Turned out to be just a fancy wrapper around Pascal.

[indian]

The stupid thing is censored anyway, can't see much, look below and you see Hugh circle blurring everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

The stupid thing is censored anyway, can't see much, look below and you see Hugh circle blurring everything.