Google wants to map the whole world with its Street View map service. For some users, the service has another function: They meet their loved ones there.
When Sheri Turner longs for her late mother, she doesn’t go to the cemetery. The American then calls up the Google Maps page and searches the online map service for the house in which she grew up. A picture from 2009 is stored there in the Street View.
This triggers many memories in Turner: “The light is still on in her bedroom. It’s still her house, she’s still alive, I still visit her every few months,” she wrote in a tweet that has now been shared tens of thousands of times . “There is still no pandemic, no other deaths, no undiscovered diseases.” Google Maps is an important tool for Sheri Turner to keep memories of her mother alive and to express her grief.
Internet users can find pictures of relatives
The US writer is not the only one who feels connected to loved ones in this way. From 2007, Google gradually expanded the map service Maps to include Google Street View, which was not uncontroversial at the time. Cars equipped with cameras took pictures of streets and houses, which were then available online. In Germany, only large cities were recorded for data protection reasons. Other countries, on the other hand, can be almost completely explored via Street View. And in many places you can see not only streets, cars and buildings, but also people and animals that were captured in an everyday moment.
For a long time, Internet users have made fun of discovering curious snapshots on Google Street View or finding acquaintances. For some, however, the images on the Google service have a special meaning. There you will find relatives who have since passed away and feel close to them in this way – by observing them again and again in this seemingly random moment in their life. Although Google uses software to automatically make most faces unrecognizable, people close to them can often still recognize the people depicted.
Google Maps als Familienalbum
“My father died of cancer last year,” writes a woman who found a picture of her father on Google Street View. “I keep looking at this picture.”
“My father can still be seen on Street View taking away the garbage,” says someone else. “That makes me laugh every time.” Others can find their deceased pets on Google Images. One user found her grandfather in the garage while screwing his car, another user even roamed the whole city via Google Street View until he found his father – he could be seen through the window of a supermarket.
Sheri Turner took a screenshot of her parents’ house to be on the safe side, in case the picture should one day be replaced with a more recent photo. However, Google Street View also offers the option of calling up older images. At the same time, in response to Turner’s touching tweet, critical voices were raised, referring to the data protection aspect: The pictures of the dead on Google Maps showed that the people shown there had been photographed without their knowledge or consent.
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