Google car causes chaos in Rome

A fleet of Google camera cars arrived this week to create thousands of embarrassing, revealing or run-of-the-mill images of life on British streets for its popular online mapping website.

Google Street View, the controversial service that has built photographic panoramas of dozens of American cities, will launch in the UK by the end of the year.

The website allows users to click on a specific address to see an image photographed in that spot or to take a virtual tour further around the neighbouring streets. The images are updated every year.

The arrival of the US internet giant’s cameras in this country has prompted civil liberty groups to threaten legal action. The website may breach privacy legislation because the photographs are taken and reproduced without the consent of their subjects.

The camera cars begun to trawl the streets of London and other British cities this week to take of pictures of unsuspecting people leaving shops, entering churches or perhaps kissing someone they should not be.

Those pictures will then be stitched together creating a panoramic virtual view of every public thoroughfare in London and other UK cities. The cameras captured random snapshots of the streets of San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami and New York before expanding across first America and now the world.

Google refused to confirm how many cities outside London the spy cars are roaming but unconfirmed sightings have been made in Edinburgh, Birmingham and Cardiff.

As Street View was rolled out across the US people were captured in all manner of compromising positions. One suspicious-looking man appeared to be shinning up a fence — perhaps to break into a house? Two men in San Francisco were apparently taking a surreptitious peek at a woman as she bent to pick up something. An ambulance driver was photographed at the side of the road enjoying a sandwich. All may have had innocent explanations but were caught in seemingly embarrassing positions.

The law surrounding Google Street View is untested in the UK, but the site could breach British privacy laws. The key test may be whether individuals are clearly identifiable, in the American version the subjects of many of the pictures could be clearly recognised.

The company plans to comply with tougher British and European laws by manipulating the images to disguise the identities of their subjects.

Google said: “We will not launch in UK until we are comfortable Street View complies with local law, including law relating to the display of images of individuals. We will use technology, like face-blurring, and operational controls, such as image removal tools, so Street View remains useful and in keeping with local norms wherever it is available."

Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, will lodge a formal letter of complaint with Google this afternoon and will raise the matter with the Information Commissioner unless the company can prove that software protections can guarantee that number plates and faces will be blurred out of all pictures.

“Google have made similar privacy assurances in the past and nothing has come of them. We will remain sceptical until we have full disclosure of the technology behind these so called protections, he said.”

Google insists that it will be sensitive to people’s concern and has installed a button on its website allowing users to alert the company if there is an unsuitable picture on the site.

Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with Pinsent Masons, suggests that since JK Rowling’s privacy case this year, Google may be in the clear.

The case found in favour of the Harry Potter author, whose child was photographed while walking in the street but, crucially, the judge drew a distinction between cameras that target an individual, in that case Rowling's son, from cameras focused elsewhere that happen to catch passers.

“There is only a privacy issue if people or the licence plates of their vehicles can be identified from the photographs. Even then, because the cameras are not targeting anyone in particular, it would be difficult to argue that what Google is doing is breaching anyone's right of privacy,” Mr Robertson said.

“There is an argument that Google should notify people on a street when photos are being taken, but Google has already suggested that it won't capture identifiable faces or identifiable licence plates in its European version of Street View. It's alive to Europe's tighter privacy regime.

"It said it can do that by lowering the resolution of images or using software to detect and blur faces. That will keep our Information Commissioner happy.”

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming