Yesterday we brought you the story of a Google Maps photo some are convinced shows a murder and others think just shows a dog getting a pet. But, being as Google Maps and Street View are nothing more than cameras constantly circulating around the world, almost inevitably they’re going to capture humanity at its worst and/or perverted.
Google tends to quickly remove these examples, but, as the maps and Street View need constant updating, inevitably crimes turn up. For example…
Murder
As we noted, Google accidentally collecting evidence of a murder or its aftermath is actually a fairly common phenomenon in some countries. Due to the high crime rate in some areas, as it maps the world it’s not uncommon for Google to actually blank out entire areas from Google Street View because they simply can’t keep up with cleaning up all the bodies in the images.
Theft
Thieves get caught on Google Street View pretty much constantly, although it’s just as likely to be used to hunt them down as it is to accidentally collect evidence. Still, the winner, and our personal favorite, is a British thief being caught about to take a leak on his victim’s driveway by Street View cameras right before he took the guy’s trailer.
Still, that’s not the crime that Google Street View and Maps really shines at collecting and recording. Oh no. The one crime Google Maps is really, really good at capturing, much to Google’s chagrin, is…
Public Indecency
Theft and murder are relatively rare on Google Maps next to people grinding gears in public. Seriously, it takes a lot to find those. People doing stuff they really shouldn’t in public, that Google accidentally recorded? That’s everywhere.
Yeah, you probably saw the Australians who actually got ahead of the Google Street View vehicle and started having sex specifically to be filmed. And you also probably heard about a, how do we put this, helping hand being given on a side street in the UK.
But Google has been catching us at our boning, peeing, butt-naked worst pretty much from the start. Google Street View outed a Russian man’s infidelity, people with nothing better to do have found dozens of topless sunbathers, and Street Views has featured far too many fat European guys urinating (OK, so there are two. That’s still far too many.)
In other words, what Google Maps has to teach us about the dark side of human nature isn’t that we’ll kill each other at the drop of a hat or that we’ll greedily swipe each other’s possessions, but that humanity is a bunch of perverts.
And despite this, Google is trying to get us all to mount cameras to our faces. Either they’re incredibly optimistic, or Google has a truly epic porn folder.