Google’s new Street View cool and a little creepy

Google, I wish you had warned me you were coming.

I would have cut up that brush pile and stuffed it in the Lenny — as my wife probably told me to do — instead of leaving it at the curb for your roving camera to find.

Now, a color photo of my house and brush pile is there for all the world to see on Google Maps’ Street View.

Lexington and 36 other cities were added earlier this month to Street View, a year-old service that allows Internet users to type in an address or click on a map and get a panoramic view as if they were standing in the street.

It’s a big advancement from online satellite images, where you can zoom in and perhaps make out the shape of your driveway. With Street View, you can count the panes on the windows.

For Realtors, it’s a dream come true. For the rest of us, it’s fascinating technology — and more than a little creepy.

So how did they do this?

Google sent cars out on public streets equipped with special digital video cameras. The cameras filmed everything around them, including the lady walking her dog outside my neighbor’s house and the truck filled with pallets driving past City Hall. The images look as if they were taken last summer.

The video was reduced to stop-action images, embedded with global-positioning coordinates, matched with street addresses and posted online.

To find your house, go to Google, click “Maps” and type in your address. If Google’s video car went down your street, you’ll be shown a picture of your house. (Or, perhaps, a neighbor’s house. Addresses are approximate.) You can see where the video car went, because the maps shows those streets in blue.

Once you have an image on your screen, you can move up and down the street by clicking on computer-generated arrows. You also can zoom in and out, and spin the view around. Way cool.

Of course, not everyone is happy about it.

Communities in other states with private streets have banned Google’s video car. Others have asked Google to remove images of their homes, and the company has generally agreed. The Pentagon has banned images of military bases.

Despite technology that blurs the faces of most people caught in the Google lens, the European Union is concerned that future filming there might violate some countries’ privacy laws.

Taking pictures on a public street isn’t illegal in this country. Already, people with too much time on their hands have found Street View images more embarrassing than a front-yard brush pile. There’s a burning car, a man walking out of a strip club, a boy falling off his bike and a man urinating in an alley. None of those images seem to be from Lexington — yet.

I spent a couple of hours looking at Lexington through the eyes of Google.

The first thing I noticed was that some big streets were missed, while the camera car made a few odd detours — such as Von Alley, between 5th Street and Fayette Park, and the occasional dead-end rural road. The camera car went down every lane in Lexington Cemetery where, predictably, there was little activity. You can check your family plot to make sure.

I didn’t see anyone coming out of a strip club or doing anything risque. But, then, Lexington isn’t a very risque place in the middle of a summer day.

When you were little, your Sunday school teacher told you to behave as if someone were always watching. George Orwell warned us long ago about Big Brother.

But who would have thought Big Brother would have a goofy name like Google?