

Guy Points a Gun at Google Streetview Car - jessicaSFNY
http://betabeat.com/2012/09/google-street-view-camera-catches-kid-pointing-a-gun-at-it/

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TomGullen
[http://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?13987-Baby-
Zyia-...](http://www.detroityes.com/mb/showthread.php?13987-Baby-Zyia-Death-
on-Brinker-Street)

~~~
Dystopian
"Body of missing toddler found in a junk-filled closet"

[http://news.yahoo.com/video/detroitwxyz-20910802/body-of-
mis...](http://news.yahoo.com/video/detroitwxyz-20910802/body-of-missing-
toddler-found-in-a-junk-filled-closet-29847396.html)

SAME HOUSE! WTF!

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eckyptang
Doesn't surprise me.

I used to live in Nottingham in the UK. You could see hookers on streetview.
It destroyed the property prices in the area in question.

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look_lookatme
Jon Rafman maintains a fantastic, ongoing picture essay using Street View:

<http://9-eyes.com/>

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nachteilig
I wish this guy listed the locations where these were taken - or am I missing
it?

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kirchhoff
See my comment above. The sites where the pictures were originally found
generally have a link to Google Maps for each image.

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ayers
What pains me is that after reading this article, the only thing I could think
about was how the article contained the overused word 'like' in a sentence as
if it was written by a 15 year old high school girl.

'Except for like, when you drive through a rough urban area and happen to have
a large gun pointed at you.'

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dkroy
Haha, you ruined the article for me. I wonder if the guy driving the car even
noticed, or was otherwise distracted by counting the minutes till he could get
done with that area.

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PeteLakakis
Michigan isn't known as the murder mitten for nothing.

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rbellio
Once Google has perfected their driverless car, it won't be an issue to driver
safety.

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tzs
Hypothetical: Google develops autonomous self-driving cars and uses them to
drive around updating map and street view data. Let's suppose the cars have
pretty good AI that not only deals with driving, but also handles deciding
where to go. One of the goals the AI seeks is to avoid dangerous situations
and minimize damage to the car.

Suppose some of these cars figure out that certain neighborhoods are "bad":
people are more likely to shoot them there, or stop them and steal parts from
them. The AI decides to avoid those neighborhoods, and uses its machine
learning algorithms to learn to predict bad neighborhoods based on its prior
experience with other neighborhoods.

Why a particular neighborhood is "bad" is usually a result of the interplay of
many complex social and economic factors. Poverty correlates well with
badness, for example.

But the car probably doesn't have poverty data. It has to rely on observables.
One observable that correlates reasonably well with poverty is race. Note this
is just a correlation, not causation. But the car doesn't care. It just cares
about the correlation.

So the car starts avoiding neighborhoods where it sees a lot of black people!

It will be interesting to see how society deals with that. It raises lots of
interesting ethical and legal issues.

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tptacek
This might sound more subtle and less plausible than it really is. In Chicago,
Google maps frequently gives me directions that I immediately discard because
I am not going to drive across Kostner & Chicago at 11PM at night. I don't
even really have to notice to map around the spots I don't want to drive
through, because the map is advisory. Maps are less advisory in autonomous
cars.

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fujiuji
Poorly written article, I agree! However, the comments section contains
uncountable kernels of white nationalist wisdom. What woodwork did these
people come out of?

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pc86
Looks like a shotgun to me, but the image is blurry.

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tseabrooks
Lol,

The image is way too blurry to say even that. It could even be a airsoft gun.

~~~
measure2xcut1x
Yeah, could also be any number of star wars weapons. Probably not a light
saber, though.

~~~
PeteLakakis
It could be a light sabre but the blade of plasma just isn't activated.

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anuraj
Naturally if you are shooting around priavte property without owners
permission and regard to privacy, you may get shot.

~~~
chris24
Is there really much of an expectation of privacy on a front porch though?

