> the USPS to be recording every street every day.
Oh, I wasn't thinking that every street every day would get recorded. I don't think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that volume of nationwide photos. (I haven't done a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so maybe I'm wrong and they actually can).
I was just thinking that there are many streetviews (especially rural areas) in Google Maps captured in 2007. My street is from 2013. Using another entity's expansive fleet of vehicles, those maps could be updated more frequently... like once a month instead of every 4 to 10 years. Also, the USPS trucks are already burning the gas driving all those roads so it's a waste of fuel to have another car drive the same route just for photos.
As for fears of surveillance, it's going to depend on:
(1) if the citizens feel they also get benefit from the updated data. E.g. web surfers on Zillow see a house for sale and they would prefer to see a streetview of the neighborhood from last month instead of 5 years ago. Same for scoping out a company's address for a job interview.
(2) Are USPS cameras perceived as a minor extension of traffic cameras at every extension that citizens drive through every day and the police car dash cams that record a continuous loop as they patrol the city? Or it's a major step change in data collection that the public would reject. I don't know.
> I don't think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that volume of nationwide photos.
If you keep taking pictures of the same things over and over, you get a really high compression ratio.
Not to mention that you have the option to throw out the old data.
4,000,000 miles of roads
(4.12 million minus 164,000)[1][2]
5280 ft per mile
200 ft as guess of distance between snapshots
60,000 bytes as estimate for 1 jpg sized for "near HD"[3]
15 photos per set [3]
... total is ~95 TB per day.[4] The Youtube stat from 2015 quoted 24 TB per day.[5] The total Google Maps in 2012 size was 20 PB.[6]
So, 95 TB is within the realm of possiblity but it seems like coordinating the logistics in the USA to upload that much from trucks every day would be a huge hurdle. (The Youtube 24TB is worldwide uploads and not just USA.) Since the vast majority of the streetview images for a particular day won't be requested by anyone, it wouldn't be a good return-on-investment to pay for that much disk space.
Obviously, the total goes up if I underestimated the intervals (100 ft instead of 200 ft) or underestimated the jpg size (new generation of HD cameras output 200000 bytes for still images). The total goes down if a significant chunk of those 4 million miles don't need streetviews. There are probably other factors I'm missing. (What's that famous Google interview question again? "How many gas stations are there in the USA?"[7])
95 TB a day would cost Google roughly a million dollars a year. For a company that routinely makes tens of billions, it's not a gigantic amount, and I'm not so sure they wouldn't make it back in extra views - "nearly live" Street View would be an incredible tool. But they wouldn't even have to save all the data for that - just keep it flowing.
As to the logistics of data transfer - why not move the data physically? You're already carrying it around in all the mail trucks. Most of the logistics are already taken care of by the existing postal infrastructure. Just take the SD card out at the depo and put it on the next mail vehicle going towards Google.
Or, to paraphrase Andy Tanenbaum, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a postal truck with a shoebox of microSD cards hurtling down the highway".
*Fun fact - a shoebox full of 128 gigabyte microSDs has a capacity of nearly 9 petabytes!
Let consumers/business request the update on a geospatial grid square, and pay some amount that could in turn be profit shared with USPS.
ie: a county could pay for its counties streets to save man hours for sqft appraisals, with just change detection, for the annual property appraisal updates.
Oh, I wasn't thinking that every street every day would get recorded. I don't think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that volume of nationwide photos. (I haven't done a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so maybe I'm wrong and they actually can).
I was just thinking that there are many streetviews (especially rural areas) in Google Maps captured in 2007. My street is from 2013. Using another entity's expansive fleet of vehicles, those maps could be updated more frequently... like once a month instead of every 4 to 10 years. Also, the USPS trucks are already burning the gas driving all those roads so it's a waste of fuel to have another car drive the same route just for photos.
As for fears of surveillance, it's going to depend on:
(1) if the citizens feel they also get benefit from the updated data. E.g. web surfers on Zillow see a house for sale and they would prefer to see a streetview of the neighborhood from last month instead of 5 years ago. Same for scoping out a company's address for a job interview.
(2) Are USPS cameras perceived as a minor extension of traffic cameras at every extension that citizens drive through every day and the police car dash cams that record a continuous loop as they patrol the city? Or it's a major step change in data collection that the public would reject. I don't know.