People keep searching for their deceased relatives on Google Maps

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For many years, Google Maps has been providing Street View, which stitches panoramic camera images together to recreate the digital fax of the physical space in the real world, which you can explore online.Some people find that if they scroll on the platform long enough and Use time travel function, They just might find images of their deceased loved ones taken by one of Google’s cameras-and seem to be kept in Google Maps forever.
In the past few days, some posts announcing these findings went viral on the Internet.One from the British writer Sherri Turner has accumulated tens of thousands “Like” on Twitter.From a similar tweet Anonymous confession account Not only attracted the attention of other Twitter users, but also attracted major attention media Outlets. These tweets have turned into stories shared by others looking for their deceased relatives in Google Maps.
I looked at my mother’s old house on Google Maps Street View, which was the house where I grew up. It says “The image was taken in May 2009”. The light is on in her bedroom. It is still her house, she is still alive, and I still visit on the train to Bodmin Parkway every few months,
-Shirley Turner (@STurner4077) June 16, 2021
This is not the first time people have used the time travel feature in Street View to search for people who have left on Google Maps-or share experiences on social media.Google released Street View in 2007, and these types of viral Twitter posts are happening all the time At least since 2013This trend shows that Google is constantly advancing in the endless search to map the entire world (Street View currently includes 87 countries/regions) and continuously update the data. In the process, Google Maps users realized that this process would have unintended consequences.
This effect shows that creating these 360-degree views of the world requires instantaneous monitoring. Google Maps uses a large number of cameras to create the immersive experience that Street View provides.Google says Digital entertainment in the physical world Driven by millions of cameras Capture multiple angles, set Being”drive, Pedaling, sailing, walking around and capturing images. The company also took action to allow users Submit your own picture to supplement your own street viewAlthough helping people remember their dead family is not the real purpose of Google Maps, a spokesperson told Recode that it is “heartwarming” for people to use the platform in this way.
Writer Turner told Recode that she discovered the time travel feature in Street View earlier this week when she tried to see what her late mother’s house looks like now, her late mother died nearly four years ago . She finally found that the last available image on Street View was from 2009. It shows that the lights in this house are on, which tells Turner that her mother was at home when the image was taken. “It makes it more like something you stumbled upon than something you have already implemented,” she told Recode.
Similarly, people have been finding photos of their deceased relatives in Street View for some time.It’s even happening Before Google launched the time travel feature. This phenomenon also triggered all News cycle Last year, when a Twitter user said that she found a picture of her late grandfather in Street View. This tweet generated more than 400,000 “likes”.
But this story is not just viral content. These images remind people that many people who appear in Street View do not know that their photos are being taken, and the deceased have no say in whether their images are kept on the service.
More broadly, technology companies like Google have a lot of power over these sensitive personal data, and citizens have no real role in setting regulations on how data related to population reduction should be handled. This is especially important because the way Google processes this data may not conform to the religious and cultural norms of death for many users around the world.
“More and more of our online users will come from the southern countries of the world,” Fahm HusseinA professor at Arizona State University’s School of Future Social Innovation told Recode. “We are seeing more and more the lack of [the] People participate in the design. “
The deceased family member is not the only surprising finding on Google Maps.Full online community A surveying and mapping platform dedicated to exploring anomalous things, identifying everything from wild animals to sandstorms.The ubiquity of Street View and Google Maps also has a wider dark side, which has caused the concern of countless people People’s privacyFor example, as early as 2013, a father in California had to ask Google to delete Aerial photo of his son’s bodyGoogle said it has established a system that can blur the personally identifiable information of passers-by and license plates in the photos it takes. But it is clear that if family members know what they are looking for, some people can still be identified.
The enduring trend of looking for lost loved ones inevitably reminds us that over time, Google plays an important role in recording our daily lives. There is no sign that the digital artifacts preserved in Street View will soon disappear. On the contrary, they may simply become part of the historical record in a process that we may not necessarily control.
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