Line: Data

Sunday, 19 June 2011

Mississippi floods: images and data

Emerging as one of the worst flooding events along the U.S. waterway in the past century, the Mississippi River floods of April and May 2011 have caused widespread destruction along the 2,300 mile river system. Historically high water levels from heavy rains and springtime snowmelt have provided no shortage of dramatic scenes -- levees breached, downtown areas completely submerged, spillways opened, and more.

The Google Crisis Response team has assembled a collection of flood data including satellite imagery for impacted cities along the river from GeoEye, flood extent and crest data forecasts from the US Army Corps of Engineers (kml) and NOAA’s National Weather Service (kml), and shelter locations from the American Red Cross (kml).

Opened floodgate in Morganza spillway in Louisiana on May 15, 2011. View full-size.

Cairo, Illinois on May 8, 2011. View full-size.

This collection of data is available on Google Maps by searching for “Mississippi flooding.” These data can also be accessed within Google Earth by turning on the ‘Places’ layer and flying to the Mississippi river south of Memphis, TN, or by downloading this kml to open in Google Earth.

Posted by Pete Giencke, Google Crisis Response Team

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Thursday, 16 June 2011

Lawmakers Get Involved In “Locationgate,” Propose Data Privacy Law

The “Locationgate” scandal that saw so much coverage back in April hasn’t been in the news much lately, but that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from trying to prevent similar situations. Two senators, Al Franken of Minnesota and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, have proposed a mobile privacy bill today hoping to strengthen the level of consent needed for app developers and device makers to collect and share location data.

In case you’ve been living under a rock (in a location already stored on your phone, no doubt), it all started when two researchers in Britain discovered that Apple’s iPhone and iPad had been recording location data, and storing it on the device. This had people up in arms, of course, and it was only a matter of time until Google was discovered to be doing the same thing. Since then, people have been pretty peeved about it, so much so that the long arm of the law is getting involved.