How to use Street View | Show us your favourite pub on Street View

Hundreds of thousands of people were able yesterday to reflect on happier times: when high streets were bustling, Woolworths was still open and the sun was always shining.

They had all logged on to Street View, a new mapping service from Google that gives 360-degree views of Britain’s biggest cities, allowing people to take virtual tours from their computers or mobile phones.

The company introduced the service yesterday after spending more than a year driving 22,000 miles around 25 cities collecting images using car-mounted cameras.

Unfortunately, the cameras only work in clement weather, according to Google, which is why the majority of the images were taken last year and hence reflect a more optimistic time before the gloom of the recession descended.

But while thousands spent yesterday afternoon using the system to see what any given road looks like from street level, privacy campaigners were angry. One leading group said that it would bring legal action against the company.

Street View has had a controversial past. After being launched two years ago in the United States bloggers had, within hours, found and posted images of people, their faces visible, being arrested, sunbathing, and urinating in public.

Learning lessons since then, Google has introduced technology that automatically blurs faces and car number plates so that they are no longer recognisable. Google has also pledged to remove any images to which viewers object. Ed Parsons, Google’s geospatial technologist, said: “This is the sort of level of detail you would get from driving down a road, the sort of picture you would see in an estate agent’s window.”

He said that faces were blurred “99.9 per cent of the time”, but that “sometimes it does not work completely”.

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said that his organisation would be bringing legal action against Google, arguing that the company needed the consent of the communities it was illustrating before it set up Street View.

Google said that it had consulted the Information Commissioner’s office about its plans, which had been approved.

Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, who brought the matter before Parliament yesterday, said: “The Government is completely out of its depth. Companies like Google are pressing ahead with applications that have major privacy implications without the Government stating a view before the technology is deployed.”

Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister responsible for policing, security and crime, promised that he would look closely at concerns with the system.

Google said that it would continue to update and expand Street View, and would add more photographs of more cities over the coming months.

How to use street view

● Street View is available as part of Google Maps, the company’s mapping service. It will work on any computer connected to the the internet, and many high-end mobile phones, such as the iPhone

● You will know it works if you type in an address and a picture of the road you want appears with a link that says “Street View”

● Alternatively, at the top left of the screen, a small outline of a man can be seen. If the man is grey, Street View is unavailable. If he goes yellow, it is

● Clicking on the man will highlight in blue all the roads on the map for which Street View is available. You can drag the yellow man on to the map, and Street View will appear

● Once in Street View you can get a 360-degree view of the road you are on. Clicking the image of the street will drag the camera left and right, up and down

● Arrows will appear on the street, which you can click on to take you farther down the road you are looking at. You can also zoom in closer to the picture

Spotted something strange on Google UK Street View? Send us the link or the image.

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