Google’s Street View — think of it as zooming in beyond the rooftops from Google Earth — captures precise images of everything in a 360? radius as its photographers (mounted cameras in VW Bugs) cruise U.S. streets. The benefit is that you can check out, say, landmarks for that restaurant you want to visit, or look at the neighborhood before you purchase a home. The downside is that these high resolution images grab a great deal of personal information from faces to license plate numbers. Under fire, Google recently started to obscure some of this content but privacy protection in this feature seems destined to be reactive as you never know what Google’s all-seeing camera has until it’s online.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/google_street_view_privacy_policy/
