Insecurity: welcome to the cities where Google no longer goes!

When Google Street View came out in 2007, the service surprised everyone. It was almost witchcraft! Imagine seeing any place on the globe without having to move. Of course, there’s no magic in that, just camera-equipped Google Cars that criss-cross the roads and patiently scan every corner of the globe. Admittedly, Africa, China, Russia and the Middle East are currently excluded from the equation, but that’s still a hell of a lot of places.

“Sensitive” neighborhoods

However, there are places where Google cars refuse to pass: our “sensitive” neighborhoods. Not sensitive like “Oh no, we are shy, please do not photograph us”but sensitive as “Get out of here, you have nothing to do with us”. The police sometimes use Street View to locate the ground before an intervention, but here it is more a question of marking its territory. There are indeed areas of lawlessness in France where you cannot move freely and where the police avoid going. So imagine a Google Car driver…

Recently a video has been talked about on Tiktok: we see a Google Car having all the difficulties in the world to enter a city in the 13th arrondissement of Marseille. The shots dating from 2020 are those taken by the car and they have been compiled in this video. Between the roadblocks manned by dealers, the people in charge of surveillance and the traps set for the unfortunate vehicle, it feels like a bad Netflix series.

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♬ original sound – Alex

Safety comes first…

In an article by 20 minutesa driver of a competitor of Street View testifies: “We are not asked to avoid certain places, in our case, it is we who decide according to the situation, he assures us. What you have to remember is that we are not putting ourselves in danger, if that happens, safety takes precedence.”. And in fact, we can see that the photos of sensitive neighborhoods are older than the others. In the Cité Félix Pyat, still in Marseille, the photos date from June 2020, while around, they are much less old (February 2023). We even listed places where Google cars hadn’t been since 2016… Is France afraid?