Google This!

As I have mentioned before I’ve been hassled on a number of occasions for taking photographs, even though I was within my rights. Some people think that their property is completely off-limits to any imaging.

I respect someone’s right to privacy. I would be annoyed if someone was pressing his camera against my bedroom window, trespassing on my property, sticking his lens where it doesn’t belong. But the times I’ve been confronted I was standing on public property, in no way peering into someone’s home.

While I get challenged, people overlook the fact that I’m not the problem. If you have concerns about privacy issues, look elsewhere.

Here are a couple of images I recorded from Google Earth that show places here in Plattsburgh where I’ve been confronted for taking photographs.




See that green marker arrow, provided free of charge by Google? That’s the area where I was taking a photograph of a tree one day. The owner of the house that happened to be behind the tree followed me downtown in his pick-up truck, stopping me to find out why I was taking shots of his private dwelling. I had to tell him twice that I wasn’t interested in his house. Nice aerial view of his house in this Google Earth image, huh? All I had to do was type in the street address and there’s the shot.




And here’s another Google Earth image, showing from above the place where a business owner prevented me from taking a photograph of a empty plastic chair on the sidewalk outside his eatery. Hey, does it look like the eatery’s roof should be fixed, that it’s sagging? Can’t tell; the resolution isn’t fine enough.

But there are probably other skyview images out there not available to the public, images so fine they can reveal every detail of your wife’s areolas when she’s sunbathing topless in your backyard.

Now excuse me. I have to make a phone call while the government listens in on my conversation.