The North Oaks Streetview images on Google are finally gone... but they are still accessible

The street view images that I once used to map the only unmapped city in America with are now gone. So it's unmapped again for literally the fifth time and I'll tell you why. When I released this video where I flew a drone over the wealthiest city in Minnesota to put it onto Google Maps finally, I didn't realize that so many people would watch. Then NorthOaks sent me a legal letter here basically telling me to not come back because I invaded their privacy.

And they value their privacy almost above all else. But here's what's weird about that. Somebody, one of you, wrote in a YouTube comment on that video I made that they've basically been invading their own privacy with these things called flock cameras, which I had never heard before, but I did see them on every entrance and exit of the city. If there's a burglary that occurs in North Oaks,

we like to be able to go back and see which cars came into that area.

That launched me on a two month journey where I learned all about the hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in the US that track you every day, likely without you even knowing it. And some smart people started mapping these cameras, so at least there's some transparency of where they are,

on this thing called open street maps, where you and I can put things on their open source map. And it turns out these cameras are everywhere. So I made a video all about surveillance cameras and how people are being wrongly accused by supposedly being caught by these flock cameras.

You know we have cameras in that town and you can't get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing, correct?

And how some cops have been using it to track their ex-girlfriends, and that is an actual sentence that I just said out loud. And that's just the tip of the iceberg because yeah, these things have been misused, but I actually think that's not even as big of a problem as how they could be misused.

I mean, who knows? Use your imagination. If they can do it, they probably will. So yeah, it's kind of scary, kind of dystopian, but it all made me realize, maybe the people that were criticizing me

for invading North Oaks privacy were right. So a few days ago, I removed all of the Street View images that remained in North Oaks. And I know some of you might be disappointed by that, but while Wikipedia says all of the images have been removed, I did actually leave one image up. And this is totally real. If you zoom way into West Drek Park in North Oaks, there's one image that remains and it's just of me taking the picture from the drone. So yeah, I removed those images from Street View, but I immediately re-uploaded all of them

to that open source map, OpenStreetMaps, because if they're gonna watch us on an unregulated camera network, it's only fair that we use an open source map to look right back at them.

I'm gonna go put this back up on the wall.

I can't honestly say that we've had I can't honestly say that we've had that level of success yet.