Yeah, I consult at a law firm every now and then when they need someone qualified to add shit. We often use Google photos to determine when repairs to infrastructure were made without having to go through public records requests. That way, for example consider this timeline: there was a trip and fall on a broken kerb, and there is a photo on Google of it being broken ten years before the fall, there’s a new photo of it broken six months after the trip and fall (which includes a little sign that says “I broke my damn ankle on this kerb”) and has a little shrine and maybe an ofrenda to the cool pants they were wearing that they tore a hole in the butt, and then like magic the city has repaired the kerb six months after the photo.

Now in this straw man I’ve built for you (and I’m from farmer stock, it’s what we’re good at) (I can’t remember who I saw said that but thanks, I’m stealing it) we’re not going through historical Google photos to stalk, we’re going through them in a single location (very, very narrow location) to see precisely when changes happened so we can prove that the city should have known about the damage to the kerb just by dint of it existing so long. So we can get the city to pay our client’s medical bills, since it’s the city’s job to maintain the krebs.

Is why I’m glad Google maps exists even though it’s privacy invasive