This one’s been traveling around various ends of the blog world for a couple of days now. While many people in coastal reaches of the US have taken a curious interest with Google’s growing network of roadside photography, dubbed Street View, a small, private suburban community known by the name of North Oaks, located to the north of St Paul, Minnesota, has decided to buck the cameravan’s advances - after the fact.
The story is a fairly simple one. Google snapped the necessary pictures, put them up for all to see, subsequently received a letter from the North Oaks City Council asking the company to take down the imagery or be cited for trespassing. Google obliged, according to spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo, who commented that she didn’t recall any other community making a similar request.
Did the stories of unusual Street View recordings make their way to the citizens of North Oaks? Or was it all about the city’s trespassing legislation? For the time being, the town is pointing to the latter. As quoted by Lora Pabst of the Star Tribune, North Oaks’ mayor, Thomas Watson, “It’s not the hoity-toity folks trying to figure out how to keep the world away. They really didn’t have any authorization to go on private property.”
The response to this one-off exception in the ongoing Street View narrative has been rather interesting, to sum it up in a single word. Some 115 comments, with all manner of arguments for and against North Oaks’ effort, have been left on the Star Tribune website alone. Of all articles published as of late, it is without question the most popular. Which is a bit humorous. In North Oaks’ removal from Google’s photographic map, the town, with a total of 4,500 current residents to its name, has inadvertently attracted ample publicity to itself. Go figure.