So, is your house shown on Google Maps Streetview?
What about the directions to get to your place? Adequate, or rubbish? And did they have a clean lens round your way?
Inquiring minds etc.
90 Responses to “If I’d known they were coming I’d have closed the gates”
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My place isn’t there, but the guy down the road has his Kevin07 poster up, so the local photos were taken between October 17-Nov 24 2007.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=-27.48842,153.023822&spn=0.005758,0.009463&t=h&z=17&layer=c&cbll=-27.488452,153.023838&panoid=FZ4DFmH5QFqWv4sn-NBelA
The Dave from Albury compound is on street view, much to my surprise. I didn’t expect google to be so thorough.
Sadly, I too failed to have the place looking its best when our visitors whipped past. Thankfully our shot is fairly low res, so you can’t tell whether or not I’ve mown the lawn.
GAH!
They must have popped by before my buddy got so frustrated with our roses that he pruned them himself. My secret shame is global!
I’ve never really been able to work out how to use Google maps, whether its of Mars or earth. So somebody’s taken a picture of my street? Big deal! I was peobably inside at the time. If I’d known they were coming I’d have stood in the street waving my hands and generally messing up the shot. (Haven’t been able to check my place.)
My view on the phenomenon.
Gawd! It’s just about peering in the bedroom window of my place. Lucky the blinds are down.
Yep, my fortified valley bunker is there all right, surprised because it’s in an out of the way place that everyone finds hard to find. The street might be 100 meters long at best. Very thorough.
No street view of my little dacha. The high resolution satellite photo is out of date too. You can clearly see the neighbour’s yappy poodle in the yard next door, despite the fact that it died of a Belgian chocolate overdose last year.
This is such a great idea. So much time saving for taxi drivers, tradies and all.
Paul, just type in your address it is a pretty user friendly site.
Sadly, they came down our street on a bin day. I do believe my partner and i were out in the front yard as there are two very obvious blurs. All numbers plates have been blocked, as well. They have been careful about the privacy issue.
While it’s always going to be a bit arbitrary what things make the cut and what don’t, what’s covered and what isn’t at the moment is really quite strange.
For instance, the Merkel townhouse in Brunswick (which is on a through road) doesn’t get coverage, while you can get a look from the Tallangatta Lookout Road - a pleasant enough view when it’s not so dry, but a rural road to nowhere.
Our car number plate is HIGHLY visable.
Jerks.
sublime cowgirl: submit a complaint and they’ll blur it for you.
Jeebers. Bruno the Alfa’s number plate is discernable as is the other car parked there. Lawn is mowed (much to my surprise). It’s both freaky and a little scary - what if the kids had been playing in the yard at the time? What a boon for house breakers everywhere - no longer need to skulk around out the front while casing your abode, just look it up on google maps.
Screw them, obviously “do no evil” doesn’t include “do not enable evil doers”.
Robert, the problem is that the onus shouldn’t be on the individual to lodge a complaint every time they see something that might invade their privacy, for what I would have thought were obvious reasons.
Hehe, the builder next door who is in trouble with council for wrecking the footpath and is trying to deny it has been sprung with the truck parked illegally across the footpath AND without appropriate traffic management in place. Wonder if I should let council know
A mate of mine who lives in the Adelaide Hills reckons they photographed his place in about February - it was pretty dry. My place, I’d guess, would also have been done about then from the condition of the garden and the fact that a dead tree I cut down a couple of months ago is in the picture, as are some bushes that hadn’t yet quite died.
Check out Barrow Creek - there’s about 1,000 miles of photos of the Stuart Hwy, but no sign of Barrow Creek itself. I was also stoked to find that both the Robertstown pub and the dirt road turnoff to my paddock from Point Pass make an appearance.
Street view is already being used in online newspapers: http://www.theage.com.au/national/wood-murder-trial-aborted-due-to-juror-misconduct-20080806-3qtg.html Neat.
My in-laws’ next door neighbour is photographed carrying a box of possessions into a removal truck.
He is in such extreme close-up it would almost be possible to detect his DNA.
Must be amazing forward planning - it’s interesting that the photo of my house must have been taken at least 18 years ago, before mid 1990, when work started on a large extension. Other houses in the street also appear to have been snapped about the same time. May not be as useful a resource for real estate agents as they might have hoped.
Actually, I must have been wearing my ‘Helen the Hasty’ hat, because I ’spoke’ too soon - I did find eventually find evidence of my extension in the picture of another house further up the street, so now think those photos would have been taken towards end of 2007.
But there’s no right to privacy in a public place! I don’t understand how you could be upset that your car’s licence plate is in a picture on the internet. If you don’t want people to see your car don’t leave it in a place it can be seen from the street! Same goes with people taking pictures of kids. Keep ‘em inside, or covered up. I can’t see that google has any legal or moral obligation to blur any of the things discussed above. It’s nice that they are responding to these complaints, but they don’t have to.
(although I’m thinking if they snapped a photo of somebody carrying a photo, the artist could compel them to remove it…)
d
Taking a quick trip around the neighbourhood, I’d say November 2007. And I can’t make out any of the cars’ numberplates, so maybe I need a higher resolution monitor. Or higher resolution glasses.
Yes, on reflection you are probably right Darryl, although I’d like to hear submissions from the prosecution.
Gummo, the high-res satellite imagery is actually aerial photography. The Adelaide stuff, at least, looks like it was flown at about 5,000 ft.
Darryl, when I give someone my address, that doesn’t mean I want them to know my rego.
Darryl Rosin wrote:
Maybe I should always dress them in a burqa Darryl?
There’s a massive difference between the ability to see something by making the effort to go there, and the massive free-kick that Google just gave to kiddie fiddlers, house breakers and identity thieves. If the government did it, the outrage would be enormous. What google is doing is wrong and incredibly intrusive.
WOW! I can see my sign outside my shop! UNREAL!
The McMansion I reside in looks an absolute treat in gorgeous sunshine.
Our house number hasn’t been blurred out, but the basketball hoop on the driveway has.
But that’s okay, all McMansions look the same anyway
“Maybe I should always dress them in a burqa Darryl?”
Well, yeah. If you’re that worried about people taking photos of your kids, that’s probably the most appropriate response. You’ve got the fear, you should bear the burden of addressing it.
What’s your proposed remedy? Ban photography in public places? A limit of the number of pics a website is allowed to display?
“the massive free-kick that Google just gave to kiddie fiddlers, house breakers and identity thieves”
Massive free kick? There’s one, maybe two pics of each house, taken a few seconds apart nine months ago from a moving car. How does that help anyone do anything? “Hey, that side gate looks like it was open last November, let’s go see if it still is. Mu-hu-ha-ha-ha…”
d
Darryl, surely you’re being disingenuous. The random aggregation of a million bits of informational flotsam and jetsam (the internet) is not the same as a geographically indexed database of images.
Darryl Rosin wrote:
Wonderful. The “opt out” society means now that anybody can be as intrusive as they like, and the burden is on me to complain to them *after* I discover my privacy has been breached. This is a complete reversal of the societal norm that demands any breaches of my privacy be accompanied by a request *before* it happens.
As for the side gate bullshit - you clearly have no idea of how a typical house breaker approaches a house. They’re looking for noise-free entry, not open gates. That means, a quick survey of a street for dodgy looking looking windows all handily enabled by Google in broad daylight the things they used to have to do at night. Don’t come crying back after your TV goes missing Darryl.
Maybe the government should ban street directories too. That would stop the thieves from finding places to rob!
Another well thought out response from Chris. You guys ought to start the mental giant collective.
Thank God Street View didn’t exist before 9/11!
alternatively
If only they had Street View in Dealey Plaza, Nov., 1963!
FYI, here’s how much of the nation is covered (H/T Down and Out of Saigon in #5 above):
FDB - I think you’ll find an increasing number of images on the internet appearing with exif data which contains gps coordinates. I wonder if google will start giving references to them based on map searches. Damn - should have patented that idea.
Well, I’m sure it’s very easy to be sanguine about this when it’s not your front yard with criminally neglected antique-variety roses exposed for all the world’s great aunts to cluck their tongues at.
Instructions for reporting your own house as inappropriate here. They list privacy concerns as being a legitimate complaint. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for the image to be removed.
But David, your privacy hasn’t been breached! Google isn’t showing anything that can’t be seen from a moving car on the street. I really, really don’t understand how this is an invasion of privacy. I can’t see how it is reasonable to expect privacy in a public space, let alone assert a right to privacy when doing routine business in a public space.
My attitude isn’t some new-fangled, post-whatever ‘opt-out’ philosophy, it’s about public space verse private space. The reason I’m a bit strident is I resent the creeping privatization of public spaces, which is where your argument leads. You don’t think I should be allowed to stand in a public street and take photos of your house. I don’t think you should be allowed to tell me what to do when I’m recording what I see in a public space, just as people have been doing for over 150 years.
My brother didn’t like the idea of people looking into his yard and at his house. He built a tall fence and planted trees (an architectural burqa, if you like). I think it’s odd and a bit ugly, but it’s his house and his business and he doesn’t need my approval.
As for the break and enter thing, well, I bow to your greater experience about thieves approach a job. I was joking, but my point was “how much use is a nine-month old photo taken from a moving vehicle?” ‘Not much’ is my thought.
I’m still interested in knowing what your remedy to the situation is. How do you propose to ban this sort of thing?
d
Darryl Rosin wrote:
Three words: aluminium sliding windows. Thieves delight, hard to spot at night, practically impossible to secure, but now beautifully captured in all their glory for every jerk with a screwdriver and a desire to steal your stuff.
Sure you can “just drive down the street” and see those things but that involves (wait for it) driving down your street, where you will be witnessed. Not any more.
The simple problem is this: individuals taking photos in public places are not a security problem, simply because stitching those photos together into a coherent whole is impossible.
Google, on the other hand, have deliberately done it. It’s a very, very different problem.
What’s the solution? Bombard the bastards with request to remove your house until they shut the whole thing down. It’s a solution in search of a problem, and I’ll guarantee the first problem that arises that fits the solution won’t be what you expect.
Different Chris, have you seen the Eye-Fi SD card?
http://www.eye.fi/
It’s an SD card with built in Wireless networking that automatically geo-tags pics. Fits in any camera.
d
Oh, and I don’t propose a ban. I propose they simply ask me fucking first before pulling shit like this like everybody else has to.
“Sure you can “just drive down the street” and see those things but that involves (wait for it) driving down your street, where you will be witnessed.”
Jeebus, what’s going on in your street? A house got robbed a couple of doors down a while back and no one saw anything. You people see every car driving down the street.
“I propose they simply ask me fucking first before pulling shit like this like everybody else has to.”
At the risk of sounding like a broken record: “Nobody has to ask your permission.” You house is on public display. I can sit on the street outside, draw it, film it, carve a model of it out of marzipan and stick photos on shoppingcentre noticeboards without having to even smile at you as you come and go. That’s the way it’s been since the invention of photography and I can;t for the life of me see why we should change it now.
d
Darryl Rosin:
You’re an idiot with no imagination and that’s somehow my fault?
David Rubie, you maybe slightly (cough) exaggerating concerns about break and enters - most are opportunistic - ie. just happened to be walking by your joint and the back door was left open etc.
“Thieves commonly entered a house through the front or back door, he said. More than one third of AAMI’s customers admitted they left their front or back doors open when they knew they should not, he added.”
You can’t see all sorts of details on Google streets that would attract or repel wobbers to a particular abode:
Number 1: does a dog live on the property? (All thieves say the same thing – you just walk to the next house that doesn’t have a dog.)
Number 2: is there a door or window left open?
Number 3: is anyone home and where are they in the house right now?
If particular thieves already know your area, then they already know your area for whatever reason. There are a million more houses than thieves – the likelihood of them picking your house off google is probably statistically more unlikely than them walking down your street esp. if you live near a main road or next to a park, or near the shops etc.
They need a hit now – not after they’ve spent hours googling up streets and doing analysis of different window openings (pretty hard to see that detail btw) which may or may not have been changed etc. and they still dont know the most important factors in choosing targets as above - 1, 2 or 3.
You just walk down ANY street and hop over a fence, what’s with the research?
And I’m assuming none of our houses have stuff that is worth casing by professional thieves for that stash of emeralds & david rubies in the upstairs safe etc.
jo wrote:
Now “just happened to be walking by” is automated to a large extent jo - I’m not disputing the opportunistic nature of house breaking (although we’ve been broken into in a distinctly planned way, details unimportant here). What concerns me is not so much any high level of detail in the pictures either - that’s relatively unimportant. What you can see via street view are major features like window types, which bits of the house are shielded from the street, where the paths are and get a good idea of how busy the street is.
Really, if most house breaking is opportunistic, just how many more opportunities do we need to give people to get this information?
Nice work jo@45. I am not sure this one deserves a ww3 breakout.
David Rubie and anyone who does not want it, should be able to have their house or the place rented by them, deleted by google.
Pretty much with Darryl on this one. Cannot see how this can hurt except in the most fantastical scenario.
Yes, and the new iPhones also use cellular towers plus a built-in GPS to location tag photos. So pretty soon we’ll be able to do an image search on google and ask for all photos within x metres of any given position on earth. We’ll end up with an enhanced patchwork version of streetview except it will also include photos inside buildings.
David - one thing you might also consider is that if thieves are looking on google maps for places to rob (around here walking during the day seems to be the favoured option for casing places), that they may consider the places which have had the pictures removed to be of particular interest.
Yer, but wilful@48, can you imagine the shit that would have come down if the government had of come up with this kind of idea?
If a large company, like google, has a money making idea that compromises some peoples’ sense of privacy, it is only fair that they should be asked first.
Rather than need to opt out.
I love it. My yard looks very tidy. Much better picture than the ones the real estate agents used to advertise the place when we bought it.
Such a bloody boring job it must have been, photographing every address in most of Australia.
The street I used to live hasn’t been photographed, kind of strangely - it’s closer to the city centre than where i live now. We got burgled there by a wobber who kicked in the front door, even though like the other tards in that aami survey we’d forgotten to lock the back door.
That’s technology for you. Pretty much all technology enables evil doers in one way or the other. It’s hardly a reason to go back to the stone age. Hell, I’ve seen reports about criminals using online forums to communicate; we should demand Larvatus Prodeo close down because it’s enabling the bad guys!
They got us on bin day too!
Maybe they have, just never made it usable for the public
They almost certainly have much higher resolution imagery looking into your backyard than is available on google maps.
Is that even feasible? Ask everyone in Australia? The power of this tool lies in it having very high rates of coverage and if you had to ask for permission even for something which is completely legal and doesn’t require permission you would get very low response rates. Imagine how thin and useless the whitepages would be if they had to ask for permission to print your phone number rather than the other way around.
I’d be interested to see what the criteria for removing images on the basis of privacy is - will they just remove images because someone has asked? Or will they require some threshold test like it has accidentally seen something through most people would consider inappropriate?
I think they’d just have someone drive around and the photos would be taken automatically. Given some of the strange places they have coverage for I wonder if they just convinced some people who were going on holiday to record photos for them
For some unknown reason my little old triangular Adelaide suburb, in the fork of two main roads, has been left out and on points I’m quite pleased about it. But with a little searching I found a fantastic shot looking straight up the road from my tiny home town towards the farmhouse I grew up in — a photo of the way home. I nearly burst into tears.
It is fantastic!
Am able to find far flung residences of relatives, places where ancestors once lived, previous workplaces, schools, places where memorable events occured, etc etc.
And am able to give a link & thus show all these places & more to far flung friends, relatives etc from all over the world.
Brilliant!
Thank you Google. Keep up the good work! (Never mind the party poopers)
“You’re an idiot with no imagination and that’s somehow my fault?”
Classy. Thanks David.
I’ve been playing with it (it’s my night off, six hours teaching on Weds) and while it’s been good fun looking up the addresses of all my friends and enemies, they look just how I already knew they looked from having seen them before.
In other words I’m having a hard time thinking of what a proper disreputable internet stalker type person would do if out to have a good time playing with street view.
Yeah, I’m at a bit of a loss to understand where the concerns come from. Also annoyed that one of my childhood homes isn’t blue lined!
This was done without permission.
Google are looking to make large bucks.
Expect, creepy, personalised postal advertising, just when we managed to liberate ourselves from some of those, unsolicted, annoying, phone calls.
Wow, how i have changed since joe2@9!
I’m not all fussed about my house being on it. Burglars will find their own ways of breaking in. Just walk/drive down the street and find the vulnerable houses. It’s not as though people are likely to notice. After all, did we notice all these Google cars driving down the stret?
“After all, did we notice all these Google cars driving down the stret?”
Yes.
+ nostalgia value
+ awesome and win
- utility value for anything crooked
…
I mean seriously, criminals who break into houses from looking from the street are opportunistic, not highly planning supercrooks.
Higher targets require different planning: I’ve looked up the Lodge and Kirribilli and satisfied myself that security is *fine*. Don’t tell me none of you have.
I opt out of having my phone number in the white pages. I had to sign up to have my unlisted number added to the “do not call” list (a blessed relief from the staggering number of stupid phone sales calls we used to get). If google won’t let me opt out of something as simple as a searchable picture of my home, they’ll be distinctly out of step as far as I can see. Even if you don’t agree with my reasons, they’re not even important. The principle of being able to voluntarily participate should be enough. I’ve already contacted them about it, we’ll see how it goes.
Since turnabout is fair play, if you don’t care about having a picture of your house available on the web, post the URL right here. With nothing to hide, we’ve got nothing to fear, right? Right?
This morning we had a list of ten or so flats we were interested in. Chose our favourite based on the Street View of the block and interior photos. Drove there, applied for the lease, approved this evening.
Saved us hours driving around town.
(actually it didn’t…we still visited ALL the other options just to confirm what we knew before we set out…the other blocks sucked)
Hello, David, logic?
I might have no problem with someone identifying where I live on google without knowing I live there without having any desire to tell anyone who comes across this thread where I live. For reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with any apprehension I might have about possible burglaries.
And Liam’s quite right - most theft is opportunistic. The two times we’ve had problems in the seven years I’ve lived here have been some junkie chucking a brick through the garage window, and someone coming in and stealing a bag when I’d stupidly left the door unlocked. Anyone who’s planning a major heist already knows how to case a joint without google’s assistance. And there are better ways of facilitating crime prevention than hiding away (literally erecting big walls is counter-productive because once someone does get through it screens them very effectively from being caught in the act). In Queensland, making it much more difficult to sell tvs, computers, cds, etc in second hand shops without documentation has done wonders for the break in rate. If you legalised illicit drugs, you’d get rid of much of the motive.
You didn’t post that URL though, did you Mark. Information that used to be voluntary, handed out on a restricted basis, now isn’t.
We’ve been able to (for a long time) rely on some very weak forms of privacy - mainly security through obscurity - it was hard work linking disparate bits of information together. Not any more, that cloak is now being actively attacked by seemingly benign corporations like Google.
Most people used to believe the white pages was a benign source of handy information before the tele-marketers got hold of it. For a time, they made our home phone next to unusable. I can’t wait to see what Google do with a mashup of street view, your IP address and that live search thingy. Imagine being able to see what the guy across the road is googling right now?
Anecdotes about your personal burglary experiences just aren’t relevent.
Maybe in cahoots with your ISP, they’ll leak your IP Address/Street Address to Kresta??
Well, the anecdotes aren’t supposed to be proving the point, but illustrating a point which can be made from statistical and behavioural research into crime and crime prevention, with which I’m familiar, David.
Personally, I don’t see that there’s any need to postulate some sort of data matching privacy catastrophe just because of this. Even if you assume the worst, I’m unable to think of any particular reason which would inspire anyone to go to the trouble, if indeed it was legal, which it would not be.
The early stages of teleporting!*
Just had a whip around the world, raiding old memories. However, it’s confronting at first: especially that a company owns it [and the work involved!]. Lingering tho is a feeling of awe that this is but a quaint and clunky semaphore for what is to come.
Like many (all?) new developments it does provide opportunity for malicious intent, but I think there’s some sort of argument for it assisting emergency services, too.
*Or the Akashic Records Google TM?
Here you go David. Now what, precisely, can you do with that information?
Oh, nothing.
Here’s a song for you.
David, I still don’t understand how Google Maps will facilitate burglary. Perhaps you ca explain.
wilful wrote:
I can see you have no parking, so if you’re home, your car will be there. I can see a nice laneway down the side of the house for entry but the front window looks like too much hard work. I see no high fences so you probably don’t have a dog. Your garden sucks so you’re probably renting and therefore the security on the house will likely be rubbish as landlords don’t care about that stuff. The italian neighbours across the road might be nosy, so it’s probably best to wear some overalls when breaking into your place to make it look slightly legit.
All the blocks are loooooong and skinny with no access from the rear, in that part of town, so I wouldn’t have to be particularly quiet and another indicator of when you’re not home as you can’t park your car around the back. If I used a moving van, nobody would even question me as I cleaned out the entire place, and if I saw very few cars overall in the street, I’d also know most of the houses would be empty given that few of your neighbours have parking either. If I saw different cars parked there from the Green subaru and the red EA s-pack falcon, I’d know it wasn’t you.
I can’t remember whether these sorts of conversations were being had when the Google Earth pix first became viewable, but surely they would be of far more use to burglars, stalkers, international spies and so on, once they’d found out where you lived? There’s a fairly hi-res aerial shot of my house showing where the gardening shed and the garage and the back door all are and how crap the back fence is since the new people down the back bulldozed the wilderness there and everybody’s back fences got bulldozed with it. If I was going to worry, I think I’d worry about that first.
“Most people used to believe the white pages was a benign source of handy information before the tele-marketers got hold of it.”
Wow. You have a remarkable outlook on the world.
The photo is many months old and will probably on average get quite a lot older. So how reliable is your information? Also its nothing that someone can’t get just by walking or driving down a street, neither of which is a suspicious activities.
I even found one guy loitering outside my place, and suspect he was ringing my doorbell to see if anyone was home (and then running away). This happened a few times before we got broken into and was reported to the police who were understandably rather disinterested.
A few weeks after the break in the anonymous doorbell ringing started again - apparently thieves like to revisit places after the insurance companies have kindly replaced all the old stuff with new stuff. What finally stopped them was fixing the security problems - securing the windows properly and installing an alarm system. After that the anonymous doorbell ringing stopped.
So if you think the google image shows some gaping security problem with your house, its much better to fix the problem than to try to censor images which have a wider benefit to the community. That way you’re protected from both sophisticated googling thieves (hope they clear their cookie cache regularly!) and the garden variety “walk around the neighbourhood” kind.
And the difference in information between seeing that online versus the real-world judgement you’d get with your eyes walking down the street would be substantial. I don’t think you should go into house-breaking.
In looking through fond memories of a beach paradise where I once lived, I could move the map around then click on various views. Imaginably this facility could be used by crooks to case a suburb, then drive to it, saving time and discovery in casing by the latter. A couple of places I lived in were very undeveloped - but they’re available in all their glory on screen right now. Coverage is extensive; it’s imaginable crooks have their choice of any town or suburb. Would it be worth the drive? I don’t know. But if you were vulnerable before, expectedly you’re more vulnerable now.
That would have to be offset by the possibility, should you or your child or someone be in urgent need of some sort of help, whereby emergency services can possibly have some idea of what’s in store for when they arrive, rather than finding it when they get there. I don’t know the chances of altered success in that regard, but the argument goes if it saved one life..
The nett result?
Their are probably much bigger implications as well (excluding the saving of one life in that), bearing in mind this surely is the pigeon carrier to the internet for what is to come, if one had time to think of them.
Wow. If you look on the global map, Australia has better coverage than anywhere else, even the USA seems more limited. And the only coverage in Europe seems to be along the Tour de France route.
I’m thinking about live feeds from millions of CCTV cameras whose locations are marked on Google Maps.
My car was broken into while parked outside my daughter’s block of units, but I strongly doubt that the thieves bothered to google her address to smash my front passenger window and steal the bugger-all in there.
Ditto the mongrels who broke into her car while it was parked in her carport.
Here’s my place if you care to burgle it.
link
The Googlemobile hasn’t been down my street yet, but here’s my place.
http://maps.google.com.au/?ie=UTF8&ll=-27.487597,153.024542&spn=0.000376,0.00059&t=h&z=21&layer=c&cbll=-27.487337,153.024982&panoid=oDOLhHRZ4pdGqNC0EvcYwQ
Just in case the troll I expelled from my blog who started ranting about guns and shooting gets any ideas, plugging in my address results in the wrong house.
“Most people used to believe the white pages was a benign source of handy information before the tele-marketers got hold of it.”
This is a common misconception. For my sins, when I was a poor student (as in, impecunious) I worked in so called “Market Research” (Please forgive me) and the numbers are randomly generated by a computer appllication.
Maybe for Market Research that’s ok, Helen. (so called? :))
For selling electricity or phone plans etc, any serious company would purchase a copy of the White Pages database so they can address the person by name (or get hold of one via the Sensis back door, or steal a copy from wherever someone worked previously).
Negative gearing cons etc, they’d ideally buy a ‘used’ database that already has age data filled in, to save having to make/pay for every second or third call.
(Please forgive me too…for spending three truly soul-destroying months writing dialler software…relievedly the company went out of business before it was completed. Never again)
Does this mean they are just as likely to get unlisted numbers as well?
Shorter answer: Yes. (Longer answer: It depends on the ratio between listed and unlisted numbers. So, kind of.)
Also, for a lot of products they’ll want to work suburb by suburb - then they can send the sales reps out suburb by suburb to follow up.
Yes, they did get unlisted numbers accidentally, but that was in the days of copious z-folded printouts from mainframes - I’m sure they have better software these days in order to cope with the do-not-call thing.
I guess my “so-called Market Research” was fairly meaningless, because I felt outraged that it was not really researching to improve the product but always to improve (or better target) the advertising. I guess that’s just what Market Research is, but when I was young and idealistic I felt it should do more than that. My bad.
I met a bloke whose job it was to take photos for google earth. He drove around the countryside in a nondescript van taking photos; well I think the satellite took the photos and he just told it where to aim. He would leave the van wherever he found himself and fly home for weekends. He was fat and ate a lot of takeaways, but I think he was well-paid for his troubles, he didn’t like the countryside much,–bit of a waste really.
“Does this mean they are just as likely to get unlisted numbers as well?”
The mob I worked for used to pull listed numbers out of the book and we had to call the five numbers sequentially on either side. So if the number was 555-4620, we’d call every number from 4615 to 4625. People with unlisted numbers were always convinced we’d somehow scammed their number out of telstra and somehow seemed to believe ‘unlisted’ meant it wasn’t physically possible to call their number without their permission.
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