Google Earth is a downloadable computer program that lets you view the world via satellite images, aerial photography, and a close-up “Street View” feature. It’s great when you need to find a donut shop, but not so great when something unexpected gets caught in the photo.
• After photographing several U.K. cities for Street View, Google fielded hundreds of complaints from citizens who inadvertently wound up in photos—including a man caught exiting a sex shop, a man throwing up outside of a pub, and a group of teenagers getting arrested.
• Sharp-eyed Google Earth users noticed a collection of 40-year-old buildings in southern California that, from above, resembled a Nazi swastika. The owner of the structures: the U.S. Navy (the buildings were barracks on a military base). The Navy spent $600,000 to redesign the facility.
• While photographing for Street View in Melbourne, Australia, Google’s car-mounted cameras captured a man passed out in his mother’s front yard. The man, who’d had too much to drink after a funeral, later complained. Google removed the photos.
• Users scrolling through pictures of upstate New York on Street View noticed a deer fawn standing in the middle of a rural road. But in subsequent shots, the deer was lying in the road, dead, with blood-soaked tire tracks leading away from it. Google’s camera car, it turned out, had accidentally hit it. The company kept the images, but edited out the deer.
• If you look closely, you can spot hundreds of photos that caught people urinating in public, including one with a French bus driver photographed relieving himself on the side of his bus.
• One Google Earth user was looking at photos of a female friend’s house—and spotted her own husband’s Range Rover out front. Divorce proceedings followed.
• At least one person was ready for the cameras: At Google’s headquarters in California, a software engineer named Michael Weiss-Malik held up a large sign as the camera passed overhead. It read “Proposal 2.0: MARRY ME LESLIE!!” (Leslie said yes.)
The FDA announced in 2008 that milk from cloned cows may already be in the nation’s food supply.