Have you checked out the latest hack to Google Maps? Somehow they've added street views, which lets you take a look at an intersection (say, 16th and Mission) from a street-level camera. You can get a street view of almost any intersection in the city, which is kinda freaky, especially because we saw two guys on the 16th and Mission street view doing...um, well, what lots of people do at 16th and Mission.
But where are these pictures coming from? We did a quick check of our favorite security-cammed intersection (Haight/Webster) and found that the images definitely weren't being streamed from those cameras. After messing with it, it looks like the Google folks went and drove around the city with some kind of James-Bond-like 360-degree handy-cam. Aside from the obvious privacy concerns -- the page declares that "Google takes concerns about its services very seriously," but doesn't mention anything at all about privacy, which is weird because, um, you can see into people's windows using this thing.
And...how did they do this? Any Googlers out there willing to spring a leak?
