My browser is too simple to support location pop up dialogs (it's some lightweight webview wrapper from f-droid with a workflow that I like), I figured it wouldn't work but after a few seconds it fell back to IP based geolocation. Very happily surprised :)
And like someone else already said, street view works fine with a coarse location like a city name, so long as the name is unique and you don't end up in another country.
doesn't look like it. it's not isolated from the ground, so any electricity is going straight into the earth. the bigger deterrent is the barbed wire, but you can get pass that (and the electric fence, if any) with a fiberglass ladder.
Google has a new policy to not rock the boat, including snitchin on anyone who might be.
Probably not that large of a group of people that both read hacker news, read this exact article, even care about such things, and work at google. At a company of that size, they are maybe fancy cogs, but still replaceable.