[Polylactic_acid]

Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are. The only purpose of mappilary in my view is for open street map mapping since the images are usually good enough to read points of interest on the side of roads so you can add them to OSM which street view does not allow.

[Freak_NL]

> […] which street view does not allow.

More specifically, while it is probably legal to use Google Street View¹ and surmise facts about the world to map in OpenStreetMap, it is also a legal minefield and any contributions based on Google Street View put OSM at risk of costly litigation.

Facts are not copyrightable in most jurisdictions, so if you use Street View to glean facts (like names on signs or the presence of a playground), legally you are probably in the clear. But the OSM Foundation has no way of knowing whether this holds true in every jurisdiction without Google explicitly allowing for such use (which it won't, because OSM is a competitor of Google Maps), so use of Google Street View as a source is not valid in OSM because of internal guidelines.

For more information, this question and answer provide some insight:

https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/710/can-i-use-googl...

1: Just Street View of course, any use of data on Google Maps is completely forbidden.

[onetimemanytime]

>>Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are.

Add FB's unlimited resources to it and see. What it is and what can be are different

[iamleppert]

I agree the quality of the images are very poor. Why go through all that effort of data collection with such inferior hardware? Most of the images are completely unusable.

[windthrown]

"Unusable" for human eyes, or unusable for computers? The images do not need to be very pretty for a computer to extract street signs and other features.

[Polylactic_acid]

I wouldn't all them completely unusable, they are just vastly inferior to googles. Personally I captured a bunch of images. If I was going somewhere already and the area was uncaptured I would just stick my phone up and capture the road. Then I would later go over the images and add things in to open street map.

[Doctor_Fegg]

I’d rather have Mapillary’s imperfect images of a trail than Google’s blank images because they haven’t driven a Street View car down there.

[HideousKojima]

A lot of them are crowdsourced, Mapillary lets anyone contribute street view images

[KaiserPro]

> points of interest on the side of roads so you can add them to OSM

Pretty much this. It allows the "livemaps" offering to build out its visual positioning server faster.

[jpalomaki]

Maybe they just wanted to make sure the data is available for OSM development also in the future.