Street View extends Google’s web-crawler dispossession into the physical world

Evidence

Street View cars are likened to Google Search’s early web crawlers, which quietly commandeered web pages for indexing and access in the corporation’s original act of dispossession. By 2012, Street View data also provided street signs and addresses. Soon, Madrigal wrote, “any word that is visible from a road will become a part of Google’s index of the physical world” thanks to Street View. Madrigal’s look at the Ground Truth operation concludes, “The geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company.… They’ve built this whole playground as an elaborate lure for you.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 474

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘index of the physical world’ phrase suggests an essay on how the search-index logic migrates from the web to real space.
• XREF: connects to: Google applies web-indexing methods to physically master reality — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 645; Google repeated the same extraction tactics across Gmail and Street View — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 443; Google’s mapping ambitions presupposed nothing in the world lay beyond its borders — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 446

Broader Connections

• Google applies web-indexing methods to physically master reality #expands (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 645
• Google repeated the same extraction tactics across Gmail and Street View #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 443