Google Maps Street View Helps Find Kidnapped Child

By Chris Crum - Wed, 01/07/2009 - 17:29

Police Use to Scope Out Scnenery

You've probably read stories about the police using YouTube to catch criminals. One guy even accidentally ratted himself out for mentioning his own YouTube videos.

Now, Google is sharing a story in which the cops used Google Maps Street View to help find a kidnapped child from Massachusetts all the way in Virginia.

"An interesting first (at least as far as we're aware): Google's Street View imagery was used by police officers to help successfully locate a kidnapped child in rural Virginia. Nine year old Natalie Maltais, from Athol, Massachusetts, was found safely at a motel on Tuesday," writes Pablo Chavez on the Google Lat Long Blog.

The police retrieved global positioning coordinates from the child's cell phone provider. Then they "googled it" as a Telegram.com article on the story reports:

Deputy Chief Lozier said that on the Internet search engine site Google there is a street view where people can look at photographs of neighborhoods in many locations.

Using the street view, he was able to look back and forth from the intersection.

Looking across a field, he said he saw a long building with a red roof that looked like a motel. He then did a search on Google for motels in Natural Bridge and found the Budget Inn-Natural Bridge, which, on a map, appeared to be close to the intersection he was looking at.

For all the privacy-related negative publicity Google Street View has received, it's nice to see a positive story about how the service has been used for something truly good.

News Tags: Google, Legal, Google Maps, Street View

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003.

11 Comments

By baby pushchairs (WPN reader) - Sat, 04/11/2009 - 08:51

Finally more good then harm.

Finally more good then harm. Thanks to Google!

By lowongan kerja bank (WPN reader) - Wed, 03/25/2009 - 10:58

Glad to hear that stuff can

Glad to hear that stuff can do such of thing. Bravo google

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By Guest (WPN reader) - Fri, 01/09/2009 - 12:24

Information itself is not

Information itself is not good nor bad, but rather how it is used. I cringe every time I see an article that blames this source of information or that source for how evil people use it. The fact of the matter is that even the best of us can misuse information from time to time.

For example, I know a gentleman who has gotten pretty high up inside an insurance company in their HR department. He learned that a vacancy in the underwriters division was soon to happen as one of the underwriters there had turned in their two week notice. He told his daughter to go down and apply for the position even though the news of the vacancy had not been made known to the general public. She did and she got the job.

He misused his knowledge of the vacancy to benefit his own family and it also may have been to the detriment of the company because someone with more experience may have been able to get that job and do it better than his daughter, but the company will never know that now. Now my friend, although he can be a prick sometimes about the money he makes, is not a bad person on the whole. He just made a bad choice with the information he had.

While I am glad to hear about this case, I will be happier still if the world communities learned from this and started trusting and better using the internet information that is out there. That, to me at least, would be something far far better to celebrate than the rescue of one child.

By Shinil Payamal (WPN reader) - Thu, 01/08/2009 - 23:14

Great tool used properly

Thanks for a great piece of good news. Great to hear about something nice happening. Normally, people think that only Terrorists use such tools to plan out attacks e.g. #Mumbai attacks. Hope the law enforcement authorities learn from this and start using technology more effectively.

Best Wishes,
Shinil.
http://twitter.com/shinils

By Guest (WPN reader) - Thu, 01/08/2009 - 20:07

kinda makes you wonder about

kinda makes you wonder about one thing though: with the GPS coordinates from her cell phone, they should have been able to find her anyway, right? I am still glad the street view was used to expedite the process; I would just hope that they could have found her anyway with the coordinates.

By Diamonds (WPN reader) - Thu, 01/08/2009 - 17:57