(Photo: Automotive.com)

Google may want to lower the bar from "don't be evil" to "don't be thoughtless" after it dispatched Street View cars to a Staten Island neighborhood devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

The New York Post reports that it witnessed a Street View car, used to collect Street View images to overlay on top of Google Maps data, driving through the New Dorp Beach neighborhood in Staten Island. Many of the homes there were destroyed by Sandy in October, and residents are working to rebuild them.

Many neighborhood residents were angered by Google's decision to dispatch the car. "They are putting us wiped out on the map!" one told the Post. Another wondered if the images would affect the value of their properties.

A Google spokesperson explained to the Post that the updated imagery will help the world understand the extent of the damage, which is probably of little comfort to the actual homeowners affected by the storm.

"The Street View team is currently redriving affected areas of New York City,” a Google spokesperson told the Post. "We hope this accurate, updated imagery that will soon be available in Google Maps will help people around the world better understand the extent of the damage and the importance of coming together as a community to aid in the recovery efforts.”

A Redditor published a screencap from a Google Maps street view camera today that shows a gaggle of young men and one woman hanging out on a front porch in Detroit. Innocent enough, except that one of the young men is holding what looks to be a shotgun. As the streetview camera drives off onto the next block, the kid aims the gun at the car.

Whoever said cartography wasn't a dangerous job has clearly never been to Detroit.

(Photo: Imgur)

Update: A couple of Betabeat readers have pointed out that this is the same house where a one-year-old girl was found dead in a closet back in June. Ziya Turner was reported missing by her uncle before being found by cadaver dogs in the closet some hours later. Autopsy results were never released. The family cooperated with police and no one was arrested in connection to the death.

(Photo: 1x57.com)

Planning to sunbathe topless in Central Park this week? You might want to make sure you're okay with having your voyeur-friendly moments played out across the Internet. Turns out Google has mounted some cameras on a dorky-looking bike and is inspecting "every nook and cranny of the 843-acre park" this week. Quick, hide that open canister!

Of course, Google insists that they will blur out faces and other identifying details as they do for all street view photos, so teenage couples that treat the park like the urban equivalent of the backseat of their parents car are safe from prying eyes.

Your move, Chuck Schumer.

Mr. Kohnstamm (ec.europa.eu)

The FCC might have let the company off with just a $25,000 noncompliance fine, but it doesn’t look like Google’s StreetView troubles are over just yet. The agency’s final report found that, no, the unsecured Wifi data grab wasn’t actually the rogue act of some out-of-control engineer. The supposed lone gunman was open with at least one senior manager about what he was doing--there just wasn’t interest in either stopping or encouraging his behavior.

This new gloss on the matter has European regulators reconsidering their initial leniency--and apparently they are none too pleased with Google.  All but two investigations (both German) were closed when the company ascribed blame to a single out-of-line engineer, and now, according to Jacob Kohnstamm, who is the chair of the E.U.’s data privacy working group, they feel misled. "We certainly will discuss the matter” at an upcoming convention, he told the New York Times, adding, "My first reaction is, this is a bloody shame."

He continued:

“Peter Fleischer made it pretty clear in his oral statement and in writing that it was the mistake of one single guy working at Google who had made a stupid mistake,” Mr. Kohnstamm said. “But apparently, it wasn’t a mistake at all.

“In a political sense,” Mr. Kohnstamm continued, “that would be considered contempt of Parliament and would mean the end of the career for the person responsible.”

But even if regulators don't reopen their closed cases, the matter is likely to play into the ongoing European investigation into Google's controversial updates to its privacy policy.