14 DAY TRIAL // Not everyone may like it, but Google's Street View is one of the most interesting projects the company is working on, considering the scope and scale of it. Moving forward with the goal of having every city, or, indeed, every street on the planet photographed and made available online, Google is now launching the program in India.
Google Street View cars as well as a Street View trike will start shooting in Bangalore, India.
This is just the first stage and it will be a while before Google captures all of the needed images and processes them. Only after that, they will be posted online.
"Imagine being able to take a tour of the streets of Bangalore from anywhere in the world. Starting today, we are going to drive our Street View cars in Bangalore," Nishant Nair, Program Manager and Manik Gupta, Product Manager, Google Maps, announced.
"Once the collection process is complete, Street View will be available in Bangalore on Google Maps, allowing users all around the world to access street-level imagery and virtually explore various streets in Bangalore. It will be as good as walking down the street from the comfort of your desktop or mobile device," they explained.
Street View is now available in almost 30 countries, after launching in the US in 2007. In some countries, it was met with resistance from privacy officials and part of the public.
For example, in Germany Google enabled citizens to opt to have their houses removed from the site, before it went live there. It's the only place Google has done this to date, but it's been having difficulties in other countries as well.
This was made worse by the fact that Google collected payload WiFi data in all of the countries it operated the service, by mistake it says, something that it revealed about a year ago.