Less than a week since Google Street View was launched and it already has elicited concerns and fears on anonimity and privacy rights in the internet, as some of its street-level digital captures show embarrassing and compromising scenes of individual lives.

There’s a man picking his nose on a street corner in San Francisco, a couple sunbathing in bikinis at Standford, a group of protesters outside an abortion clinic. In some places you can even see men coming in and out of strip clubs and adult bookstores.

“Everyone expects a certain level of anonymity as they move about their daily lives,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group devoted to protecting people’s rights on the internet.

Experts say that these issues are imminent as the internet makes it easy to trade images and videos, creating a thin line between the rights to freedom of expression and the rights to personal privacy.

“What you have to do is balance out the perception against the reality and I think in this case, the perception is much scarier than the reality,” said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility, a policy group.

However, as most street-level images are taken from public places, Google is seemingly on a solid ground and will continue expanding their latest mapping innovation.

Google Street View features high-resolution images, enabling people to have a street-level and more realistic 360-degree view of particular places. At the moment, Street View maps that are available are of San Francisco Bay are, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami. Google plans to expand this feature to other US cities and other countries.

Originally posted on June 3, 2007 @ 11:48 pm