I’m on Google Earth

[Miss Chicken]

I saw the Google car drive by the other day. I looked yesterday and found myself walking home from the local shopping centre.
So I am asking people here 1) have you ever made it onto Google Earth or 2) have you ever seen anything unusual on Google Earth. For example I once came an across a Buddhist monk sleeping by the roadside in Bhutan with a little dog sleeping next to him.

this is me

 

[Tenacity]

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes

 

[JD]

For a while you could see one of our dogs sleeping on the patio in our backyard in the overhead satellite image, but they updated it with a new picture back a month or two ago, and he wasn't there when he took the new picture.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The land lord spent a thousand dollars cutting down four tons of native trees.

The picture on google earth years later, still does not reflect that.

I've since moved and there is talk about demolishing the house.

How inaccurate can one app be?

 

[Miss Chicken]

I think the former pictures of my neighbourhood were years old before the recent update. You used to be able to see our old letterbox which we replaced about 6 years. It looks like most of Hobart has been updated this year.

Another odd photo I saw was of a house in Mongolia. The entire top floor of a two storey building was fully packed with chairs piled on top of each other.

 

[NCC-73515]

I was on ABC eyewitness news last week or so

 

[publiusr]

You can see my mug at the post office…um…

 

[JD]

The land lord spent a thousand dollars cutting down four tons of native trees.

The picture on google earth years later, still does not reflect that.

I've since moved and there is talk about demolishing the house.

How inaccurate can one app be?

I think the former pictures of my neighbourhood were years old before the recent update. You used to be able to see our old letterbox which we replaced about 6 years. It looks like most of Hobart has been updated this year.

Another odd photo I saw was of a house in Mongolia. The entire top floor of a two storey building was fully packed with chairs piled on top of each other.

Sometimes if you look at the bar on the bottom of the screen in the app, it will tell you when the picture was taken.

 

[Relayer1]

Yeah, I was snapped having a "heated discussion" with Mrs Relayer and Jr. on holiday in Truro some years back.

I think it's gone now.

Edit - yup, it was roughly outside Malletts Home Hardware. Gone now.

 

[Miss Chicken]

Sometimes if you look at the bar on the bottom of the screen in the app, it will tell you when the picture was taken.

I wish I had known that when the old photo was up. I never looked for the date at the bottom I see they also have the elevation. My house is 20 meters above sea level so I should be safe from the rising seas.

 

[scotpens]

Not a street-level view, but one that definitely needs an update. See the big empty lot in the middle of the picture? Right now there's a massive 5-story apartment building under construction on that property (which unfortunately happens to be next door to my apartment building).

 

[BK613]

I wish I had known that when the old photo was up. I never looked for the date at the bottom I see they also have the elevation. My house is 20 meters above sea level so I should be safe from the rising seas.

IDK about the app version but the web-based version of Google Map's Street View has a link on the dashboard panel that says 'See more dates' which will let you browse through previous images of that location, if they exist.

 

[Avro Arrow]

This wasn't anything I found (it was on the news), but there was an image on Street View a while ago, where if you set your location to the right spot, because of the way Google stitched together the images, it looked like there were twin CN Towers:

Either that, or it was a brief peek into this same alternate universe:

Kidding, of course. You can see the same glitch on the streetcar as well.

 

[Australis]

Just had a look.

Wow, my current address (son's and DiL's) is really up to date! Not more than 2 months old. My car is there, number plate obscured.

My last previous couple of addresses have all been updated too. My last NSW address though had the same pic up for ten years and was terribly out of date, as the street had been extended through.

 

[rhubarbodendron]

Never happened to me, fortunately. We Europeans are pretty strict about data protection. In Germany and several other countries it is forbidden to show people's faces without their explicit consent. Google has to blur all faces on all images taken here. We even have a special word for this: verpixeln (roughly: to pixelize or to pixel apart).

With houses it's the other way round: there they must not show house numbers (car number plates neither) but may show the house itself unless you contact them. If you request it, they must blur your house on all of their images. If they don't follow your request, they get fined heavily. After a certain number of such fines Google has pretty much stopped making pics. That's why street view is rarely available on German maps and mostly public buildings are shown.

Posting a person's address or name publicly is strictly forbidden (unless you post your own data) and no company may pass on your data without your explicit and written consent.

 

[Miss Chicken]

I think they blur faces and car numbers everywhere in the world. I just looked at Lagos, Nigeria and Ulaanbataar, Mongolia and both faces and car numbers were blurred in those cities.

House numbers are shown here in Australia.

 

[BK613]

Either that, or it was a brief peek into this same alternate universe:

I thought Will and the Witches closed all those...

 

[DEWLine]

In answer to the opening question: not that I know of.