Is Google's 'Street View' Watching You?

"[T]he Web has been buzzing about the privacy implications of [Google's] Street View - with varying degrees of seriousness. Several sites have been asking users to submit interesting images captured by the Google service, which offers panoramic views of miles of streets around San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.

On a Wired magazine blog, for instance, readers can vote on the 'Best Urban Images' that others find in Street View. On Thursday afternoon, a picture of two young women sunbathing in their bikinis on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif., ranked near the top. Another showed a man scaling the front gate of an apartment building in San Francisco. The caption read, 'Is he breaking in or has he just locked himself out?'

Google said in a statement that it takes privacy seriously and considered the privacy implications of its service before it was introduced on Tuesday. 'Street View only features imagery taken on public property,' the company said. "This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street."

Google said that it had consulted with public service organizations and considered their feedback in developing the service, which allows users to request that a photo be removed for privacy reasons. A Google spokeswoman said the company had received few such requests.

'I think that this product illustrates a tension between our First Amendment right to document public spaces around us, and the privacy interests people have as they go about their day,' said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group."