Category: Mon Valley Miscellany || By

Sorry, Liberty Borough, you didn't make the cut. Your fellow South Allegheny Gladiators in Port Vue and Lincoln are out of luck, too, and so is most of Glassport.

Our Fair City also got short shrift, and Braddock was completely ignored, but Duquesne made out like a bandit, as did Rankin, West Mifflin, East McKeesport and North Versailles Township.

I'm talking about the "Street View" feature on Google! Maps, the newest service of the web-searching behemoth.

Google! Maps already featured satellite and aerial imagery; the Pittsburgh region (also known as "Greater McKeesport") is now one of 15 metropolitan areas whose streets were prowled by Google's camera crews to capture low-resolution, 360-degree pictures.

You can learn how to use the Street View feature by visiting Google's help page.

North Versailles native and sometime Almanac reader Jim Lokay had the story on KDKA-TV last night, but he covered it from Market Square in Picksberg.

Inexplicably, he didn't visit his alma mater, which is included in Google's Street View feature, as is a certain bowling alley in Pitcairn called "Lokay Lanes."

Yet big swaths of the Mon-Yough area aren't covered, and some of the omissions are puzzling.

One side of White Oak is done, but the opposite side isn't. Patches of North Huntingdon have been photographed, but parts of Monroeville weren't.

At first I thought they might have selected more populous census tracts and ignored smaller ones, but why do parts of Penn Township and not Elizabeth Township?

And there doesn't seem to be any demographic pattern --- meaning I don't see any race or income-based selectivity. Duquesne (no one's idea of a wealthy community), for example, is well-covered.

It looks to me as if the Google folks drew a rough circle around the Golden Triangle and covered most of the streets within that circle, then grabbed some of the busier secondary roads. I suspect the blank areas (like Braddock and Braddock Hills) will eventually be filled in.

As best I can tell from various clues (the Street View image was taken after Eastland Mall was demolished, for instance, while Kennywood's parking lot is full) the photos were all taken this summer.

According to Elwin Green's story in yesterday's Post-Gazette, Google is sensitive to privacy concerns, and if someone wants their picture removed, they can ask Google to remove it, but according to Wired Magazine, it's not all that easy.

I had trouble finding Google's own help page on the topic, and when I did find the text, it turned out to be fairly terse.

(Green's employer is pictured on Street View, by the way, and so is the competing newspaper across the river. But the great, gray lady of Lysle Boulevard is only barely visible.)

But as Green points out, "Street View" is not real-time video, and the pictures are fairly blurry and indistinct. You'd have a hard time making out facial features or license plate numbers or other identifying information, and your rights to privacy on a public street are almost non-existent.

Besides, anyone who wanted a picture of your home or business could just drive past and take one.

So, I wouldn't get too concerned about your privacy being invaded, and anyway, there's a much bigger problem to worry about.

Playing with Google's Street View is an enormous time waster. You could easily lose an hour or three scrolling around different neighborhoods.

Does anyone remember how we shirked responsibilities before the Internet?