If Google Earth, warrantless wiretaps and constantly buzzing ghetto birds didn't already give you the impression Big Brother is watching you, now comes word that every public street and highway in
unincorporated Orange County and its 34 incorporated cities will be added to a database of high-density,
360-degree, street-level images.
Blue Dasher Technologies announced this earlier in the week, revealing that snapping up 6,200 linear
miles of Orange County will help the Miami, Florida-based firm achieve its goal of total coverage of the nation's most-populous state. The company licenses its database to third-party
providers of commercial, industrial, government and consumer applications.
Apparently, special Blue Dasher “image capture vehicles” will soon be out there on the mean streets of OC, recording 360-degree images every eight to 10 feet. This from the company PR machine sounds reassuring:
[Blue Dasher] users have access to exact addresses, which
results in a much more useful tool for a host of applications, from
economic development, commercial real estate research, zoning and code
enforcement, and residential real estate assessment, to consumer
applications, such as planning a trip online. Blue Dasher also provides the
ability to embed detailed information, such as multimedia, property data,
or advertising into its images at specific geographic locations.
At least that detailed information is not being embedded directly into our heads . . . yet.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.