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September 23, 2019 04:34 am

Google Loans Cameras To Volunteers To Fill Gaps in 'Street View'

NPR explains why a man "applied to borrow a 360-degree camera through Google's Street View camera loan program."Kanhema, who works as a product manager in Silicon Valley and is a freelance photographer in his spare time, volunteered to carry Google's Street View gear to map what amounted to 2,000 miles of his home country. The Berkeley, California, resident has filled in the map of other areas in Africa and Canada as well.... Google says it has "largely mapped" only 87 of nearly 200 countries on the platform, which launched in 2007. Many other countries on the planet have at least some Street View coverage, Google says. But there are sizable gaps in regions like Africa, Antarctica and Central Asia, while areas such as the U.S. and Europe are mostly filled in. While users can see almost every street corner in places such as Paris or New York, they can't do the same for Algiers, Algeria, or Kabul, Afghanistan. "We start in the large metropolitan areas where we know we have users, where it's easy for us to drive and we can execute quickly," says Stafford Marquardt, a product manager for Street View. He says the team is working to expand the service's reach. To do that, Google often relies on volunteers who can either borrow the company's camera equipment or take photos using their own. Most images on Street View are collected by drivers, and most of these drivers are employed by third parties that work with Google. But when it comes to the places Google hasn't prioritized, people like Kanhema can fill in the gaps... All this is a lot of work, but for Kanhema, it's a hobby. Google doesn't pay him or the other volunteers -- whom the company calls "contributors" -- for the content they upload. Kanhema, for example, spent around $5,000 of his own money to travel across Zimbabwe for the project. "What motivates me is just being that constant nudge on these companies and this system to pay attention to those parts of the world," he says. Craig Dalton, an assistant professor of global studies and geography at Hofstra University, says Google's business model plays a big role in which places are added to Street View first. "Google Maps is not a public service. Google Maps is a product from a company, and things are included and excluded based on the company's needs," Dalton says. "Sometimes that means that things are excluded that have a lot of merit but that don't fit the business plan..." Although the company's end goal is to make a global street map, Kanhema is unsure when places like his hometown would be visible on the platform without volunteered images. "There's not always going to be a business case to tell the story of how people live across the world," he says. The volunteer contributors to Street View can sometimes receive funding from tourism boards or travel agencies, according to the article, but Street View's product manager adds that Google currently has no plans to compensate its volunteers. He says instead that Google compensates its volunteer contributors "in a lot of other ways" by offering "a platform to host gigabytes and terabytes of imagery and publish it to the entire world, absolutely for free."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/0SSzS6tW28M/google-loans-cameras-to-volunteers-to-fill-gaps-in-street-view

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