Right: Privacy advocates and organisations have run advertising campaigns against the "street view" project and have threatened Google with lawsuits.
Arguments suggesting Google Street View is a threat to privacy
1. People can be photographed in embarrassing or compromising situations
The vice president of Liberty Victoria, Anne O'Rourke, has claimed that Street View raises serious privacy concerns and has called for tougher regulations.
'Google Earth allows for all sorts of surveillance of citizens and is being used without any regard for privacy. It's time we set strict limits on government bodies and private organisations,' Ms O'Rourke has stated. 'There are people who walk around in their underpants or sunbake in the nude and they should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their own backyards.'
Street View has published pictures of men entering brothels, of women sun baking in bikinis, of one Australian man sleeping on a nature strip after attending the funeral of a friend. The Google Street View team in Australia also took a photograph of a house burning down which they then posted on the Street View site for that area. These various photographs have all been condemned as at the least inappropriate and at the worst as violations of individual privacy.
It has been claimed that the taking of these images and then their posting on the Internet raises doubts about the sensitivity and the judgement of those managing Street View.
The Australian Privacy Foundation included the following in a statement it issued in relation to Google Street View in April, 2008, 'People have a legitimate expectation of a degree of privacy in public places. There is a difference between being seen doing something in public, and have a camera capture that act. For example, while a person might be comfortable walking home from the beach wearing a bikini, that same person may not necessarily consent to a photograph of her doing so even being taken, let alone being made available on the Internet.'
2. Properties and vehicles can be checked out by potential thieves
In an article published in the British newspaper The Sun on April 12, 2008, an ex-burglar, Richard Taylor, who fronted the BBC television show 'To Catch A Thief', has explained why criminals will be assisted by Google's Street View.
Mr Taylor has stated, 'This is nothing less than a burglars' paradise. Anyone who wants to burgle your house will be able to plan everything on their laptop at home in the evening.
The Internet is already a wonderful tool for criminals... But now Google Street View will make the Internet many times more useful to burglars and, thanks to 3G technology, people will be able to get it on their mobile phones.
The big thing when I was planning a burglary was working out how to get away. If the police turned up on foot or by car I wanted to know how I was going to escape before the helicopter arrived.
Basically, you knew if the police helicopter got there before you got away, there was a 90 per cent chance of being caught.
Street View will also be great for those who steal cars on demand. Those in the loop know there's a list of high-powered sports vehicles and other cars in demand. Street View will show thieves where such cars are parked overnight and give them a good idea of what sorts of locks, on gates etc, they need to deal with.
There are people who travel the country selling info to burglars. Street View will help give them more information.
If I were planning a burglary, Street View is the first tool I would use. You cannot overestimate how big this will be for criminals.'
3. Paedophiles can identify potential targets
It has been claimed that Google Street View can supply information which could be used by paedophiles in the targeting and accessing of children whom they might then abuse. A United States pressure group titled 'Stop Internet Predators' issued a press release which states, ''Street View' application allows anyone to view high resolution images of homes and schools, images that in some cases include children playing outside. Many times parents are unaware such applications exist and are therefore unable to protect their families accordingly.
Although images are not live, Google Street View can memorialize a minor's photograph in association with a physical address without parental consent for all on the Internet to see. Stop Internet Predators urges parents to call for a ban on Street View in their communities until the technology is safeguarded to protect their children's privacy.'
Van Luchene, an American who lost his brother to a violent sexual predator, is the founder of Ryan United, a non-profit organisation dedicated to keeping children safe from sexual predators.
Mr Van Luchene has stated, 'Applications like "Street View" make it too easy for anyone to track how to get to our children before they even walk out their front door. We must be proactive and ensure that all possible safeguards are implemented on these alarming online applications.'
On September 10, 2008, Stop Internet Predators announced that over a dozen national and state advocacy groups within the United States had joined their effort to increase awareness of emerging Internet technologies that can endanger our children's safety and privacy.
4. Employers and other authorities are given excessive access to people's lives
It has been noted, for example, that city councils could use Street View to check for council by-law and building regulation breaches. In an article published in The age on September 24, 2008, it was claimed, 'Several Victorian councils using Google Earth and Google Street View to identify illegal building activity and breaches of local government laws.
City of Yarra building surveyor Dan Curlis said Google Earth had "added another arrow to the quiver" in the battle against unauthorised home renovations.
"I've searched my own property with Google Earth and you can tell if the rubbish bins are on the front nature strip," Mr Curlis said. "The clarity of these images is improving all the time and we can zoom into a backyard and pick up some really interesting detail."'
Though there are those who say that the only people who need to be concerned are those who have done the wrong thing, there are others who claim that this level of observation is unreasonable and has the capacity to effectively allow council officers and others to harass people who have committed very minor infringements of by-laws or other regulations.
The US National Legal and Policy Centre (NLCP) has released a dossier of information about an unnamed Google executive - later revealed to be co-founder Larry Page - including his address and route to work, using information compiled only from Street View images in 30 minutes. The NLPC took this action to demonstrate the ease with which Street View information could be used to compromise the provacy and security of ordinary people.
'Perhaps in Google's world, privacy does not exist, but in the real world individual privacy is fundamentally important and is being chipped away bit by bit every day by companies like Google,' NLPC chairman Ken Boehm said.
5. Images can be stored, copied and transmitted in other forms
It has been claimed that the problem is larger than potentially embarrassing images occurring inadvertently on Street View. There are those who deliberately browse through Street View in serach of such images and then copy them and post them elsewhere. One of the difficulties with prvacy and the Internet is that once an image has been posted it may not be possible to ever either withdraw it or control when or where it will subsequently be used.
Sensitive images from the United States including one of a woman exposing her G-string, another of a man striding into an adult bookshop and yet another man apparently relieving himself have been copied and spread across the Internet. Though they have now been removed from Street View it is far more difficult to remove them from the other sites on which they now occur.
It has been claimed that Google Maps has given rise to entire communities of armchair explorers who share interesting, entertaining potentially embarrassing discoveries