London — Google Inc.’s controversial “Street View,” service that gives Internet users panoramic street-level view has appeared in 25 cities in the UK and the Netherlands with new technology to address people’s fears of being captured in the Internet search leader’s images.
Street scenes in 25 UK cities from Aberdeen to Southampton can be viewed using the service. The Netherlands version of the service also launched on Thursday, bringing the number of countries covered to nine and the imagery available comprises video taken along 22,369 miles of UK streets by customized camera cars.
Millions of similar images, captured by cameras equipped on cars driven last summer, show residential addresses, people and vehicles.
The Street View service, which allows users to navigate around a 360-degree view of city streets, including buildings, traffic and people, using pictures taken by Google’s camera vehicles.
Google said it was addressing privacy concerns by using software to blur images of pedestrians or car license plates.
“Privacy is really important to us. We think we have largely addressed those issues,” Ed Parsons, a geospatial technologist for Google, told a news conference on Thursday.
“Anything that can identify an individual person or car, we are doing our best to try to remove (that) image.”
The privacy systems were developed in consultation with the UK privacy commissioner, and Parsons said facial blurring worked in 99.9 percent of cases. Another technology could be used to complete the job if necessary, he said.
Google said the service is already available in six other countries including Japan and Australia — allows users to view panoramas of major streets, look up landmarks and plot driving routes.
But the service has been criticized for invasion of privacy since it was first launched in the United States two years ago.
“If people dislike their homes being featured on Street View, we will take them down, or cut them out of the image,” Parsons said.
“We have spoken to Scotland Yard and, from a crime point of view, they are happy with it, there are no issues there,” he added.
In addition to that users could also flag an image to Google if it raised privacy concerns or contained inappropriate content, and Google said the image would be removed or blacked out in “almost all cases”.
The 360-degree street-level view offers Web users the experience of walking down the road and being able to look around from side to side to see the cityscape in any particular direction.
Street View UK is available in 25 UK cities, including London, Belfast, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Cardiff.
Emma Simpson looks at Google’s Street View in action…
Cities covered Street View UK are: Aberdeen, Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Coventry, Derby, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Scunthorpe, Sheffield, Southampton, Swansea, York.