Google Street View Car Spotted In Suisun

A Patch employee spotted one of Google’s Street View cars near Chase bank today in Suisun! I called up Google to find out what I could about the cars and their technology.

Google’s Anne Espiritu sent me back this e-mail and the accompanying video you can click on to watch details about how Street View cars operate:

“Generally speaking, Street View cars have special cameras that take photographs as they drive down public streets. Once the photographs have been taken, they go through computer processing to make them ready for use on Google Maps.

This includes cutting-edge face blurring technology, which helps make sure that passers-by in the photographs can't be identified, and we also blur legible license plates. Once in Google Maps, you can visually explore and navigate a neighborhood through these street-level photographs, moving up and down streets, or looking around in 360-degree panoramas.

In addition, we've also created easy-to-use reporting tools so that people can ask for images of their house, car or themselves to be obscured in Street View. They can simply click on “Report a problem” on the bottom left-hand side of the Street View image, submit a request, and we'll blur the image.”

Click on the video to see more details!

Of course, there were limits to what Espiritu could tell Suisun City Patch:

"I'm not at liberty to share details about the location of the car in your area because routes are often subject to change based on factors such as weather, driving conditions, speed of  collection, etc."