Google Street View cars are apparently combing Stockholm, and when those images finally make it into Google Maps and Earth, I’m pretty sure that the Swedes won’t collectively betray anything more than amused curiosity. That’s a completely different reaction to the pockets of hysteria that greeted the advent of Street View in the UK, mainly among the gutter press and its readers. Why such a difference? Let’s think up some hypotheses.

Both in Sweden and in the UK, Google isn’t first to market with a street view product. Since October 2008, a UK company called Seety has made a proprietary street view dataset of London available on the web. Seety’s panoramic dataset is even more complete that Google’s for central London, as it contains images of plenty of mews and other small streets that Google Street View simply skipped. For example, check out Stanhope Mews East in South Kensington in Seety and in Google Street View. (Well, OK, you can’t in Street View.)

(The Mail Online used these holes in Google Street View coverage to concoct a conspiracy theory, of course.)

Meanwhile, in Sweden, the popular Swedish directory and mapping service Hitta.se has had a street view beta available for Stockholm since December 2008, based on MapJack‘s technology.

One difference between Hitta.se and Seety is that Hitta.se is a well known service in Sweden, and its introduction of street view images received widespread positive coverage in the local media, perhaps even with a frisson of glee that a local hero had beaten Google to market with something. When Google’s own imagery arrives, Swedes will see it as a catch-up maneuver; to then also worry about privacy all of a sudden would simply be too obviously hypocritical. Seety, meanwhile, doesn’t enjoy nearly the same level of mindshare in the UK. Most Londoners did not know that street view imagery of them and their homes had already been on the web for six months when Google Street View arrived.

Also: Technology journalism is mainstream journalism in Sweden. Swedes are among the most tech-savvy people in the world — bittorrent is no mystery to most of them — and many newspapers have a daily technology section. The tech news agenda in Sweden is not driven by scientifically illiterate hacks at places like The Sun. In the UK, it sometimes is.

Another difference is cultural. The compromise between transparency and privacy is drawn differently in these two countries. Swedes tend to live transparently: Home windows are rarely curtained, with little expectation that others will stop to peer in. Everyone’s tax return information is in the public domain, but most people aren’t that curious about their neighbors. A law called Allemansrätt (the right of public access) gives everyone the right to roam through private property, for personal recreation. (In the UK, the property rights of landowners are far more sacrosanct.) Swedes are conscious of these traditions, and generally prefer an open, transparent society for the benefits they feel it brings them.

It is also possible that the British, on the whole, have not in fact been in an uproar at the release of Google Street View — just British journalists, some privacy extremists, and the burghers of Broughton village. The journalists and Broughton’s villagers fulminated about how burglars would have a field day; the privacy advocates about how 360-panoramic photos of public places often incidentally contain people in them — something which British legal precedent maintains is not an invasion of privacy (reports the BBC).

According to Google, takedown requests for Street View imagery on the first day were “less than expected” (reports the Guardian). Nevertheless, Google in the end felt a potential PR crisis had to be contained, and so brought out the big guns — not just Google Geo head John Hanke, but even Google CEO Eric Schmidt, to state the company’s case.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is taking a different tack in producing a competitor to Street View — they’ll be crowdsourcing the acquisition of photos, leaving it to us to take them, and then sorting the uploaded pics spatially via their Photosynth technology. In this model, there is no systematic coverage program à la Street View, which is a technology new to most people and which reminds some of the panopticon or 1984’s big brother; taking snapshots, however, is something we’ve all done, and such familiarity is unlikely to create a backlash for Microsoft’s plan. The main question is whether crowdsourcing will produce enough usable images: Google tried to crowdsource its 3D buildings layer by making SketchUp free, but Microsoft’s own program of systematic 3D city data acquisition so outpaced Google’s that Google soon adopted Microsoft’s methods.

Was it something I did? On April 5, the very day I moved from Egypt to Shanghai, the Egyptian government announced that its blanket ban on GPS devices was over. If I were more paranoid, I’d be taking it personally.

As Egypt’s Daily News points out, the only two remaining countries banning GPS device use by citizens are now Syria and North Korea.

It will be interesting to see whether the early adopters of Egyptian iPhones, sold until now without GPS functionality turned on, will be able to get the GPS chip turned on via a firmware or software upgrade. Or else, it really sucks to be a law-abiding early adopter in Egypt.

Cairo-based friend and blogger The Arabist recounts an interesting rumor doing the rounds there as to why this change, now:

Ahmed Ezz, Gamal Mubarak’s right-hand man, imported a luxury vehicle equipped with GPS that customs did not want to release. So he asked his buddy Gamal [son of President Mubarak] to change the regulations.

The Arabist goes on to say he thinks the story is likely apocryphal, but it is telling nonetheless that this kind rumor has legs in Egypt, because many people consider it to be an entirely plausible explanation of how government policy is made.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf, on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been breaking up for a while now, and Ogle Earth’s been turning satellite images of the remaining ice bridge into KML overlays (see here and here). Now it’s finally happened: The ice bridge, too, has disintegrated.

This time, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center has taken the latest MODIS imagery and turned it into a georeferenced time-lapse series for Google Earth. Download it here, and be sure to animate it with the time slider.

This past weekend’s Google Earth imagery update has brought higher resolution imagery to the lower two fifths of Sweden — I’m guessing around 1 meter resolution from looking at the resolution of cars.

The imagery is credited to Lantmäteriet, Sweden’s state GIS agency, which previously has been excoriated on this blog for its blatant attempts to camouflage its censorship of “sensitive sites” in its imagery. Until now, Google Earth hasn’t used Lantmäteriet’s data, opting instead for uncensored Digital Globe tiles on top of 15m resolution base imagery.

Curious as to whether censored Swedish data had found its way into Google Earth, I checked the place that started the original scandal, the headquarters of the the FRA, Sweden’s “National Defence Radio Establishment” that had been turned into a fictional forest on national maps. Lantmäteriet’s latest imagery of the FRA HQ appears clear and unphotoshopped:

But is it? Looking back through Google Earth’s historical archive of imagery, which contains Digital Globe imagery guaranteed to be untouched by Lantmäteriet’s censorious instincts, it is easy to toggle the current view with older imagery. Notice how there are two satellite dishes at the north end of the compound, pointing in different directions across the years as they are photographed by passing satellites.

Imagery from August 7, 2007, credited to DigitalGlobe.

But they suddenly go missing in Lantmäteriet’s most recent imagery.

Current imagery, credited to Lantmäteriet.

One possibility is that they were dismantled. But look closely, and the area shows inconclusive signs of photoshopping — there is some faint ghosting and repetition, and the tonal gradations don’t look as smooth as elsewhere. You wouldn’t notice it, unless you were looking for it.

Would Lantmäteriet still do such a thing? Absolutely. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Lantmäteriet’s head of security, Michael Munter, back in April 2006, when he explained why it was possible to buy imagery from them that appeared unretouched — the answer being because it was retouched, just more cleverly than before.

In our image there are retouched areas, but not buildings. The secret objects are retouched, but in another way. It isn’t often that we retouch buildings.

My suspicion is that those satellite dishes are the kind of “secret objects” he is referring to, and that we’ve just found a case of such censorship. It should be easy enough to test the theory: Lantmäteriet’s source imagery comes from SPOT, IKONOS and QuickBird satellites, which is available via channels other than Lantmäteriet, so it’s only a matter of time until a reference image is available for comparison.

I understand (but don’t approve of) the fact that some national GIS agencies feel the need to censor imagery before releasing it to the public, even if it’s a useless pursuit in a world of multiple international sources for such imagery. What I really object to, however, is the attempts to obfuscate such censorship by adding geographic fictions to imagery. It makes such images less than useless, because not only are they fictional in some places, you don’t know where they are fictional, which brings the entire dataset into disrepute. Anything you look at might be fake.

Instead, Lantmäteriet should do like their Dutch counterpart. If they feel compelled to censor, they should pixellate in an obvious way, so you know where the imagery has been degraded and should not be relied upon.

Of course, Lantmäteriet may have mended their ways, and those satellite dishes really have been dismantled, but lingering suspicion is what you get when you’ve been caught lying about your data once before.

As a new arrival in Shanghai, I am keen to explore the cityscape, and have just spent a glorious spring weekend doing precisely that on my bike. But what newcomers like me lack is an institutional memory, a grasp of the geographic history of the city.

Growing up in New York, I had a child’s keen interest in skyscrapers, and can tell you even now in what approximate order the skyscrapers of the upper east side mushroomed, and how the neighborhoods evolved in response. But in Shanghai, I don’t have such context — and in a city where the pace of change is this rapid, that can feel like a handicap. How did a particular area look just 5 or 10 years ago? Everybody knows, except me.

Until now! Currently, I’m staying in an apartment building that I was told is just three years old. So, what came before? Google Earth’s historical archive proves to be the perfect tool to find out:

You can try this yourself at home: Here’s the location as KML; then turn on the historical imagery function and explore.

Shanghai is full of areas like in the video above, which have transitioned from old low-rise popular neighborhoods to skyscraper compounds. (This has been happening in Beijing too, where the practice has attracted criticism for its disregard of historical patrimony.)

Luckily, imaging satellites have been around long enough that such an archive can extend back over a decade for Shanghai. The historical imagery isn’t just usable for something as mundane as verifying real-estate agents’ claims; it lets you explore places that are now permanently inaccessible, because they exist only in the past — and on Google Earth.

I’m in Shanghai now, I’ve found a place to stay for a while, and things are settling down to a merely moderately hectic pace. The shopping here is incredible — I’m not the shopping type, but already I’ve bought a bike, a legally unlocked iPhone (take that, Swedish Telia!) and have been ogling some very innovatively designed tea sets in trendy shopping alleys that have sprung up all over the place.

In other words, time to start blogging again. Thanks for bearing with me during this hiatus. And while I promised I wouldn’t do this any more, here are links to stuff that caught my eye this past month.

• The Sea Ice Physics and Ecosystem eXperiment, September to October 2007, now in Google Earth.
• “1,000-year-old fishing trap found on Google Earth“, says the UK’s Telegraph, without telling us where. Fortunately, Frank Taylor finds it for us.
• “Google Earth detects tsunami ‘trigger’ spot in Caribbean“, or rather, a scientist uses the application to discover an area of coastline on Dominica that is vulnerable to collapse. Of course, the article doesn’t show us where this coasatline is, but I suspect it is this place.
• CNet has a Q&A: California lawmaker wants to blur Google Earth. Joel Anderson is clearly wading into something which he hasn’t thought through.
• UK’s Telegraph: “Google Earth used by thief to pinpoint buildings with valuable lead roofs“. Quick, let’s blur all the roofs! Then the burglar will have to go back to driving around town, looking at them from his car. But at least the world will be made safe again from tech-savvy lead roof burglars.
• The [unofficial] History of Virtual Worlds, by Avi Bar-Zeev.
• Anything the Sun writes sets off my BS detector. Including “Google cheat view“, about a woman who supposedly used Street View to find her husband’s car parked outside a mutual friend’s house when he was supposed to away be on business. Main problem with this story: She couldn’t have known when the Street View imagery was taken. In other words, the story was made up. In the Sun? Shocking!
• ReadWriteWeb: Real Time Cities, or Just Info Porn?
• Google Earth as conceptual art muse: “Dead pixel in Google Earth” by Helmut Smits.
• The Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System is a EU and UN initiative that “provides near real-time alerts about natural disasters around the world and tools to facilitate response coordination.” It’s got a Google Earth layer.
• ReadWriteWeb: “Finally, A Practical Use for Second Life“, about data visualization in virtual worlds.
• TED Talk: Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech. Plenty of out-of-the-box thinking there with potential applications in the neogeo arena.
• Last but not least, Karen and Frank Taylor are soon setting off on adventures nautical, and are geoblogging them.

Up next, probably tomorrow: Something about the wholly expected privacy brouhaha in the UK.

Louisa Wood, project manager for the marine protected area (MPA) layer in Google Earth, is looking for volunteers, and asked if she could post a job description here. Louisa works for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an international non-profit organization.

The IUCN and Google have partnered in an initiative to make information about Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) available to a global audience in ‘Oceans in Google Earth’, available through Google Earth v5.0. This layer contains both exciting multimedia content and core data on MPAs that is critical to our global monitoring efforts. IUCN WCPA-Marine, in collaboration with many partners, has also developed a web portal, www.protectplanetocean.org, which has the following objectives:

• to provide complementary and additional information on MPAs to that provided in the Google Earth layer;
• to provide a conduit to the best marine conservation information on the web;
• to provide a publicly accessible and editable online system for all users to add and update MPA data and multimedia content that is displayed in the Google Earth layer.

We are currently offering a range of volunteer opportunities to work on this exciting, collaborative initiative. The primary benefit of volunteering for IUCN WCPA—Marine is career development. We offer a unique opportunity to work on ground-breaking and globally-reaching marine conservation projects with extremely high-profile partners, from a range of sectors, such as Google and National Geographic. IUCN WCPA-Marine is also the world’s premier network of marine protected area expertise, consisting of professionals and academics who work in all aspects of marine protected area (MPA) planning and management, both theoretical and practical, and at all scales, from on the ground in a single MPA, to global. After working with us for at least six months you will be eligible to join WCPA-Marine. In addition, the roles we are currently offering will enable you to develop a range of skill sets that are of value to both academic and professional contexts, including web development, research, GIS and data management, communications and outreach. Finally, our global focus means you may have the opportunity to work with people from all over the world, literally.

Our volunteering opportunities are organized in a somewhat modular, product-oriented way, so that, depending on your time availability and skill sets, you may be interested in undertaking more than one. Please review feel free to apply for all those of interest to you. Current positions available include:

• Assistant web developer
• Multimedia Assistant
• GIS and Google Earth Assistant
• MPA Research Assistant

Full descriptions of all opportunities can be downloaded here. Applications should be sent to Louisa Wood at lwood@iucnus.org. These are ongoing positions with 6-monthly cycles. The next application deadline is 15th May 2009.