
Street View camera rigs do much more than just take photos - panoramas4good
https://www.trekview.org/blog/2019/google-street-view-cameras-more-than-meets-the-eye/
======
lalos
They have been previously used to collect SSID names and other WiFi network
metadata. See [https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-
investigation/](https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/)

~~~
ForHackernews
Not just metadata: Wasn't the controversy that they were sniffing data
packets, too?

~~~
jetrink
I remember the outrage that this revelation generated and I am still stumped
by it. First, the probability that a Google car happens to capture sensitive
information as it drives past your residence once per year is basically zero.
Even if it did, it would still require detective work to correlate it to you
specifically. Second, if you are worried about people recording data broadcast
by your WiFi router, it's up to you to secure your network. I would be much
more concerned about a neighbor snooping on my traffic. What did people
imagine that Google was doing with these random snippets of data?

~~~
72deluxe
Does that mean you'd be alright with me sitting outside your house taking
photos of it and scanning for network signals coming from your house and
running a software radio receiver to see what you've got going on inside?

If not, why are you alright with Google doing it?

~~~
chrisdhal
If you are in the street, then yes, that is considered "public" and there's
really not much I can do about it. I have zero expectation of privacy if you
take pictures of the front of my house from a public area. If my WiFi signal
reaches the street, then, again, that's a public area.

I may not like it, but doing it from a public area is perfectly legal (in the
US at least). Now, you can't come onto my lawn to get a better signal, but
there's really not much I could do if you parked on the street in front of my
house.

~~~
bkor
> I have zero expectation of privacy if you take pictures of the front of my
> house from a public area.

That's not accurate. The expectation of privacy is a legal term related to the
USA. There's quite a difference in privacy you'd expect. E.g., just because
you could see someone doesn't mean it's ok to hang a camera pointing to that
place and record everything that's going on. Similarly, I do expect to have
privacy in public places. It's weird not to expect that. Cameras have a big
privacy impact, just because you could have a security person there doesn't
mean that a camera is the same thing.

> I may not like it, but doing it from a public area is perfectly legal

If enough people do not like it the law should be adjusted. Too often the
argument is that something is legal. This while people are changing and
introducing new laws on a daily basis.

~~~
chrisdhal
I agree. I'm never said that if enough people don't like it that it shouldn't
be changed. I was talking "now". If what somebody is doing "now" is legal,
then right "now" there isn't anything you can do about it. I can call the
police, they'll either not come because it's legal, or they'll come, maybe
talk to the guy, then say to me that he's not doing anything wrong.

I'm didn't say I had to like it, just that sometimes there's not much you can
do at the moment. There's a distinction.

------
alufers
I wonder if all the tech in those cars requires modifications to the vehicle
itself, like a larger alternator to satisfy the power requirements or
reinforced pillars to support the weight of the hardware. It'd be cool to hear
from somebody who knows how they equip those cars.

~~~
barbegal
Those modifications seem unlikely, You can't easily reinforce pillars in a car
and they are designed to support the full weight of the car in a roll-over
situation so a few 10s of kgs of equipment on the roof make little difference.
Similarly, a typical alternator is rated to 2kW so far above the required
power of a few LIDAR, camera and computing devices. Having said that, early
vehicles did have heavy duty alternators installed (although they may have
confused these with heavy duty inverters which are needed) and modified
suspension components [1]

[1] [https://pub-tools-public-publication-
data.storage.googleapis...](https://pub-tools-public-publication-
data.storage.googleapis.com/pdf/36899.pdf)

~~~
jeffbee
The linked history of street view does mention that the first instance had an
alternator “from a fire truck”.

~~~
tyingq
Fwiw, direct fit high-amp alternators are available for most cars. And they
are in the same ballpark of ~200 amps, and high output at idle as a "fire
truck alternator".

So it's a fairly cheap modification just to swap out the stock alternator.
~$500 or less.

~~~
Scoundreller
Car choice/ÉCU programming may come into play here.

I thought cars were “intelligent” enough to not charge while idle or warming
up because that’s when emissions and inefficiency are highest.

~~~
tyingq
I think it should "just work". The added load would drive voltage down, so the
inputs the ECU gets continue to send the right message. So long as the
alternator has enough capacity to meet the demand...

~~~
MertsA
Yeah if a manufacturer wanted to hold off on drawing a higher load to recharge
the battery until after the car was warmed up they would just do that by
lowering the setpoint. If you try and draw higher current from it it would
still meet that lower setpoint.

------
mavhc
I assume they're using them to make global HD maps for Waymo too

------
TaylorAlexander
Hey that main website is cool! [1]

I literally just ordered a GoPro Fusion last night so that I can create 3D
captures of hiking trails using photogrammetry. I will then use the 3D trail
models for reinforcement learning for my off road robot. [2]

The basic pipeline is images to Meshroom (perhaps with pre-processing since
Meshroom doesn't seem to support 360 cameras), then instant-meshes to reduce
the poly count of the mesh, Blender to map the texture on to the new low poly
mesh, save as .glb file in Blender, then open in habitat-sim for machine
learning. Blender was the hardest part to learn, but tutorials on youtube walk
through the whole process.

Interestingly the GoPro Fusion is pretty cheap now, as GoPro has a new model
which is apparently not much of an improvement. So while the new model is
$499, the Fusion is currently $179 on Amazon.

Previously I have tried photogrammetry of trails with cell phone video. It
works really well but the narrow field of view of the cell phone camera
compared to the whole 360 degree scene means the resulting 3D reconstruction
has lots of holes, and the model is only well reconstructed immediately around
the trail - wider terrain is missed.

The 360 camera captures all angles, front and back, sides and top. It should
make for some fun immersive video to throw on youtube but it will also be
great for photogrammetry. I found this research paper [3] which supports my
thinking that 360 cameras are useful for photogrammetry.

[1] [https://www.trekview.org/trek-pack/](https://www.trekview.org/trek-pack/)

[2] [https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/](https://reboot.love/t/new-
cameras-on-rover/)

[3] [https://www.int-arch-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-
sci....](https://www.int-arch-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-
sci.net/XLII-2/69/2018/isprs-archives-XLII-2-69-2018.pdf)

~~~
panoramas4good
Thanks!

Would love to hear more about your project. Sounds very cool.

We're working on some computer vision problems (we plan to open-source soon).
Perhaps there's an opportunity to collaborate?
[https://www.trekview.org/greenhouse/](https://www.trekview.org/greenhouse/)

Drop me an email dgreenwood at trekview dot org.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
They that looks like something I want to do too! I like the idea of my robot
being able to identify all the native plants around it. My mom is a landscape
designer and she knows the latin names for almost every plant we come across,
so it's something I want to support in my robot. I'd love to collaborate! I
will email you. :)

------
barell
It says DGPS (Digital Global Positioning System) is it the same as
Differential GPS?

~~~
panoramas4good
Author here. That was a typo. Should read Differential GPS. Now corrected.
Thank you!

------
tyingq
I wonder what the total "BOM" cost per street view vehicle is.

~~~
jeffbee
$20k-$60k. [https://www.trekview.org/blog/2019/history-of-google-
street-...](https://www.trekview.org/blog/2019/history-of-google-street-view-
cameras/)

~~~
tyingq
Interesting, though that seems to be the camera system cost only.

~~~
panoramas4good
Correct. I would hazard a guess, after accounting for discounts (in 2012,
there were 250 GSV cars on the road [1]), that the camera kit (inc. sensors)
could easily cost > $50k. The list price of the the LIDAR scanner used is $8k
alone (the cars use 2).

[1] [https://petapixel.com/2012/10/15/a-glimpse-of-googles-
fleet-...](https://petapixel.com/2012/10/15/a-glimpse-of-googles-fleet-of-
camera-equipped-street-view-cars/)

------
lihaciudaniel
This is genuinely creepy for that wifi names can lead to finding the person's
name and thus you have found to a few minorities their location, and name. And
also for local businesses you can now track and use that data forgood or bad.

------
freefriedrice
The camera acronym is "SICK"? As a sales rep, that would be a tough one to
pitch. Like Moland Springs water.

~~~
detaro
No, that's the name of the company making them, named after the last name of
the founder.

~~~
freefriedrice
Well now I feel like a dolt.

------
rsanek
This should have a label of (2019) -- article is nearly 5 months old now.

------
steerablesafe
Relevant xkcd (alt text): [https://xkcd.com/1204/](https://xkcd.com/1204/)

------
lonk
...accidentally, in some cases collecting network data packets...

~~~
ethanbond
As I note above, Google hired a wardriving expert onto Street View. Assess for
yourself how accidental you believe that collection to be.

------
jb775
"Accidentally" collected network packets (including traffic on the network,
websites being visited, etc)..... whoops!

~~~
shadowgovt
TBF to Google, that's something anyone can do. If a person really doesn't want
their activities known, it's incumbent upon the person to not do those
activities over an unsecured wifi network. That's the radio equivalent of
shouting your browsing history in public.

(This is one of the oldest privacy arguments and extends outside the radio
spectrum. Philosophically, if you stand naked at your own bay window and I
walk by on the street and chance to spy your genitals, and the fact they were
seen bothers you, who screwed up here?)

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I'm torn on this. On the one hand, yes, it's easy to see accidentally
recording when they really didn't mean to. On the other hand, have you ever
heard of Google recording less data or giving people more privacy by accident?
If "mistakes" always favor one party then it seems fair to start blaming them.
On the third hand, _would_ you hear about that if it happened? I mean, what
would that look like? "Oh, today's ads are slightly less targeted"? "Oh,
Google location services doesn't automatically place me by my wifi WAP"?
Negatives aren't just hard to prove; they're hard to see in the first place.

So I'm skeptical, but I don't know how to have enough data to really be sure.

~~~
knorker
You mean has Google ever lost data? I'm sure it has.

Has Google ever "undertargeted" ads? Obviously yes. Every single outage in an
ads system makes it target less well, basically.

And there was that time Ads preferences for basically everyone seemed to
indicate that I (along with everyone I knew) was interested in "Raggeaton",
whatever that is.

------
yters
If the CIA was driving down US streets photographing, scanning and sniffing
everything, I think we'd have a different reaction. At least with Google we
know all the data is in good hands.

~~~
propogandist
Did you forget that Keyhole, which became Google Earth and Maps, was acquired
by Google from the CIA's venture capital firm In-Q-Tel?

[https://www.iqt.org/google-acquires-keyhole-
corporation/](https://www.iqt.org/google-acquires-keyhole-corporation/)

~~~
gt2
Think he was being sarcastic.

