How sheep with cameras got some tiny islands onto Google Street View

It wouldn't be a "gift" from the USPS. It would be a mutually beneficial financial contract. (E.g. 5 year multi-million dollar contract to mount Google cameras.)

Similar to how private events pay the government for extra police officers to direct traffic or supplement security. Or how the Pentagon charged the Top Gun film production $25,000 to turn an aircraft carrier around.[1] Government entities have set the precedent that they will sell services to private companies.

The citizens' access to the USPS photos would a given and be part of the contract.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-it-cost-25-000-to-turn-the-shi...

Oh, I wasn't thinking that every street every day would get recorded. I don't think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that volume of nationwide photos. (I haven't done a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so maybe I'm wrong and they actually can).

I was just thinking that there are many streetviews (especially rural areas) in Google Maps captured in 2007. My street is from 2013. Using another entity's expansive fleet of vehicles, those maps could be updated more frequently... like once a month instead of every 4 to 10 years. Also, the USPS trucks are already burning the gas driving all those roads so it's a waste of fuel to have another car drive the same route just for photos.

As for fears of surveillance, it's going to depend on:

(1) if the citizens feel they also get benefit from the updated data. E.g. web surfers on Zillow see a house for sale and they would prefer to see a streetview of the neighborhood from last month instead of 5 years ago. Same for scoping out a company's address for a job interview.

(2) Are USPS cameras perceived as a minor extension of traffic cameras at every extension that citizens drive through every day and the police car dash cams that record a continuous loop as they patrol the city? Or it's a major step change in data collection that the public would reject. I don't know.

Results from opening the original page, without adblock, and scrolling down to read the article: Over 1000 requests, 30MB, and 2m later I killed it early to save my poor browser (it's ok, FF, I won't let them do that to you again). 121 unique domains, including a dozen from google, as well as amazon, yahoo, facebook, maybe 10 other ad networks I didn't recognize, at least 10 analytics sites, and over a dozen separate CDNs. 2 separate auto-playing videos. As I scrolled back up it reloaded the ad slots a second time.

AMP? 145 requests and 3MB in 5s. 42 unique domains, fewer google domains. One ad. Nothing autoplayed.

Still not pretty, but I know which one I prefer. I'm not trying to argue HN link submission policy here, I'm just saying AMP might be net good on the web and maybe we should consider leaving it next time for the good of other readers.

And to be fair this website probably has one of the highest adblock user ratios of any online (both html/amp go down to 80/40 requests with uBlock Origin enabled) so this doesn't affect us as much proportionately. But at least AMP is doing something with this dumpster fire.