Smile, you're on Google Earth!

Smile, you're on Google Earth!
By Tim Hall
02/06/2007
Telegraph UK

Google on collision course with Microsoft

A new internet map service that allows users to "travel" through city streets via real images has raised privacy concerns after it captured people in a variety of compromising situations.

Street View: A pedestrian's eye view of Times Square, New York
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=MSNNCAAKSNPW5QFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/06/01/ngoogle201.xml

The new "Street View" feature on Google's Maps and Earth services gives a pedestrian's eye view of much of San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami.

The static street scenes are seamless compilations of photographs in which car licence plates, homes and people are visible.

The images were captured by a van-mounted spherical camera which captured video footage in several directions.

In the process, Google photographed various potentially embarrassing scenes that had been highlighted on the internet within hours of Street View's launch.

advertisementIn San Francisco alone, they include a man leaving a strip club, another going into an adult bookshop and a third being questioned by police.

Google said it planned to extend the service to other urban areas around the world, including in Britain, but was not able to say when this will happen.

Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, said Google was "irresponsible" to launch such a product without also providing technology to allow people who had been photographed to hide their identity.

"If the Google van happened by your house at the right moment it could even capture you in an embarrassing state of undress as you close your blinds, for instance," he told CNET News.

Apart from personal indiscretions, there were wider concerns about people entering or leaving domestic violence shelters, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, fertility clinics and controversial political meetings, he said.

Greg Sterling, an internet maps expert, said it was getting harder for individuals to remain invisible as technology becomes more advanced.

He said: "Relatively speaking, privacy has been eroded by all this readily discoverable information."

Google has described Street Level as a "rich, immersive browsing experience".

The US internet giant stressed that it only featured images taken on public property, adding in a statement: "This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street."

The company said it would routinely review requests to remove "objectionable imagery".

However, Mr Bankston - who was once himself exposed as a secret smoker on a similar but short-lived web service - said that offering to remove a photo was of little use if the subject didn't know of its existence.