We’ve told you about how Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are supposedly two of the most Earth-conscious guys on, um, Earth, even though they’re prone to decidedly un-Green activities like blasting off into outer space and jetting off to Richard Branson’s private Necker Island for a super-cool Global Warming confab.
Well, that might not be the full extent of their hypocrisy. As Deceiver reader Ben Kalish writes, now it looks like the planet-plundering pair are bending over backwards for their fellow billionaire eco-trendoid:
After poking around Google Earth today, I noticed Necker Island was “conveniently” and almost completely shrouded by a cloud.
Must be nice to be friends with Larry. Just sayin’…
I decided to check it out for myself. After getting the latitude and longitude of Necker Island from Wikipedia (courtesy of Jimmy Wales, who also attended Branson’s little world-saving get-together), I plugged it into Google Earth and got this:
Looks fishy to me! Google Earth is supposed to give you a top-down view of any point on the globe… except their pal Richard’s house?
Google’s planet-mapping initiatives have long been criticized as an invasion of privacy and even national security. A Pennsylvania couple is suing Google for photographing their private property and putting it on Google Street View. Australia has worried that Google Earth images of a nuclear reactor could aid terrorists, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades actually use it to launch missiles at Israel. The whole idea, Google says, is to “point and zoom to any place on the planet that you want to explore.” If it helps bad guys stalk you or blow things up, that’s just the price of progress.
But hey, if a place happens to have cloud cover 24/7… what are you gonna do?
It’s particularly ironic, considering that last September Branson used Google Earth to try to find his friend, missing (and now presumed dead) aviator Steve Fossett:
Branson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. he was worried that Fossett, who disappeared over the Nevada desert after taking off in a small plane late on Monday, had not activated the aircraft’s emergency tracking beacon.
“I’m talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space.”
Didn’t work. Must’ve been too cloudy.
P.S. Heh, I’m only six months late…
They say the three most important things in real estate are location, location, location so, how do you do better than permanently under a cloud? I wonder how that effects the solar panels Branson must surely have installed.
And “don’t be evil” sounds positively Orwellian.
“But hey, if a place happens to have cloud cover 24/7… what are you gonna do?” Googles aerial images are not updated with any sort of real-time useable frequency. The images are usually 5 years old give or take and compiled from differnt days and different satellites. However, I agree the cloud is probably there on purpose; but its a static image. Try to zoom out and see if the cloud patterns fit with what’s over the house.
db - I’m not saying you’re wrong, as it makes sense that a lot of the pictures are old (you obviously can’t have a satellite over every spot on the planet at the same time, even the government has to reposition), but I have a really big question.
If the pictures are 5 years old, why would Branson ask them to use it to look for his friend?
“I’m talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space.”
These would have been photos taken of that area BEFORE he crashed, so they couldn’t have repositioned their sats for it. He also specifically says ‘last 4 days’. So I’d wager to say a lot of those sat photos are more recent than we might think. I just get the feeling he’s made sure updating that PARTICULAR photo is not exactly a priority.
Thank you.
Good Lord! They can’t see in my basement. Can they??
not surprisingly, there is no cloud over branson’s island on microsoft’s virtual earth.
Yes, we can, and you really shouldn’t do that.
Who said money can’t buy power and happiness…..oh right that was the rich people telling us poor people that to make us feel better.
I can tell you that their pictures of my community are more than 5 years old. The high school my daughter will be attending this fall finished construction within that time frame. The aerial pictures they use don’t even show the ‘new’ gym in which my brother wrestled ten years ago. Also, the street addresses are off by at least 2 blocks.