eek!! I Found Satellite Photos of My House Online!! Now thats scary...

Oh yeah, that sort of stuff is fun....check out Apple's campus or various stadiums around the country...very cool!

Nice house btw, I really like your landscaping and color of the house...

i know where you live now...

I think the second one is an aerial photo taken from a survey plane. I do not believe the photos available to the public online with that degree of scale are satellite.

I used to work for a company that did that. We used a high-end digital camera coupled to a sensor and hard disk and mounted in the belly of a small plane (which allowed us to fly under the clouds). We made some beautiful full-color photographic mosaics. Just be careful if you like to sunbathe nude on the roof of your house!

...if you are going to be paranoid, maybe you shouldn't point out your home and post it on MacNN.

How'dya gets one 'a them there pics from the big 'ole satellite?

Come now - sat photos with that degree of resolution and a ton better are more than available on the net. Pay a few bucks and you can even see the photo of the guy swimming in the pool with your wife while you're at work.

There are at least half a dozen firms providing high quality, high detail sat photos for any address in the US. You may have to pay a few bucks to have them take a specific shot, but there are dozens and dozens of images of every square yard of the US aleady on file.

I got the photo from

http://www.terraserver.microsoft.com/


type in your address and see if they have your house online

I'm not paranoid about the general public but its a scary thought to think that government and other large corporations can spy on you from the sky

True but I could tell that photo was from Terra Server plus they were stamped U.S. Geological Survey . And I am sure it is more than a few bucks. Those images are usually too old to assess current data so unless they only wanted ground surveys the images would not be worth the cost
I know there are firms that will allow you to have custom images taken but that is very costly and there is a background check. If you don't pass that you won't have much luck getting the pics.




So could anyone with a plane or helicopter. Or a good telephoto lens on higher ground.

You're right about it being costly, but no background check is required. As long as the customer can pay, there are companies who can make these images (like my former company). A lot more goes into a true orthophoto than just a good telephoto lens. The geographic and terrain information are all incorporated in a orthophotomosaic, as well as the positional information of the aircraft. It's quite a feat, really.

No, the scary part is that it's microsoft

spooky .....

Mapquest.com also has it :-).

last I checked you could still download the terrabrowser software for OS X....access all those images from your desktop and it's pretty damn fast...

How nice...you live in Edward Scissorhand's suburbia...how lucky of you.

-r.

Doesn't that large push pin in your yard get in the way?

Paranoid as I am, I typed in my neighbor's address. Turns out that the last time a picture was take of my street was in 1994. The development I live in is only about 2 years old.

I think it's scarier that you can go to google and type in a persons name and phone number and it pulls up their address with a link to a map! Try it, if it's a listed number it comes right up.

Well, you could always consider suing the website that posted a photo of your house, like the sainted Barbra Streisand.

...and lose. Like Barbra Streisand.