That would be *Cobalt*.

Funny but that's how TeleAtlas map the streets

http://pics.livejournal.com/krow/pic/000qc6bq/s320x240

http://pics.livejournal.com/krow/pic/000qbxx8/s320x240

http://pics.livejournal.com/krow/pic/000qa92q/s320x240

http://pics.livejournal.com/krow/pic/000q9r87/s320x240

But they take the lat long information and send it to India to process the attributes

I wonder how much storage space is required for a photo of every road in America. They are probably quite high resolution too. I'm guessing thousands of terabytes!

Shouldn't they be Goobalts?

I hope everyone realizes that this is one of many steps the government is taking to have eyes anywhere at anytime. First it was satellites, then the patriot act, now this....Sky Net is coming....

yes steve, thousands of terabytes. lol

Hahhaha, goobalts.

On a more serious note: 1984, here we come!

Hunter: Lets not overreact here buddy. It's not like these cars are on constant patrol or anything. They just drive around taking still photographs every few seconds. It's a little creepy I suppose, but it's hardly big brother having a camera everywhere. there are much easier ways for them to accomplish that.

Every ATM you drive past. Every convenience store or liqour store or Wal-Mart that has a camera trained toward the parking lot and the street.You can access freeway cameras from the internet.Every where you go in a major city you are photographed and the time and date you were seen there is recorded.

Amazon already did this and failed to complete it. It was a great experiment and I used it for about a year and it disappeared one day.

Hunter, uhm, Google is the government?

I mean, I know the U.S. has been having trouble with voting systems, but you guys didn't replace elections with PageRank did you?

I'm guessing this just got stumbled, because this is already up and running on Google Maps. I could see this being useful.

As for privacy concerns... you're just as likely to be caught by a newspaper photographer, surveillance cams or seen by, uhm, everyone else on the street?

Won't we look great! Onboard personal computers to go with the pedals we will all install in our cars when the OPEC boys turn off the tap! C'mon! get with the real current problems and give up the wild dream that nothing has changed - Oil is $107.00 a barrel today! Wake up America!

I really hate it when people complain about StreetView. I would imagine if you were the one on the internet it would seem creepy, but the thing is that these take a new photo of a street once a year (if even that often.) It isn't like George W. made Google into his own private surveillance company. It's just Google trying to be helpful by using the money they made to do something USEFUL instead of being like Yahoo and wasting their money on more trivial things like games and movie reviews.

Jay... good comment!

A single image is not surveillance and if you happen to stand outside doing something wrong at the time the car drives by and snaps an image... that has to be a 1:100,000,000,000 shot... there are 30 cars... grow up. This is technology growing, not just for map views so you can actually SEE where you are going rather than some multi colred map with lines all over the place but also for the camera department, creating a camera to take a 360 degree photo so many seconds between shots--I assume the camera knows how fast the car is going as well. IMO Google is NOT a company to complain about.

i'd like to add 'yet' to the person who says "google is not a company to complain about"
eventually, new ownership, slumping profits, reorganization, evil corporation.

oh, also i forgot to add that the best estimate for googles total available storage space is around 300 PETAbytes.. 300,000,000 gigabytes.

Were can one apply to get a job like that way too cool see the country on someones dime.

Google is completly complacent with the Us about what to take pictures of and what not to, not only that I'm sure if enough ppl said something they'd allow you to ask to take your house off the web. and as a couple other ppl mentioned, they take a picture less than once a year and anyone they see they screw the pixals so that you can't make it out and they do the same for license plates and any other form of ID. so quit complaining and enjoy looking at your house from the street.

30 Cobalts? Thats a lot of Garmin GPS units on back order. I wonder if they added On Star too...

Hmmm. On another slant. Could these be used for gaming purposes? I would love to be able to tear through the streets of Tampa in a Lambo.

They should team up with a rental company and rent out the cars. Google gets profit from the drive time, and someone gets to drive around a car with a funny thing on top.