Google, the Internet search engine favored by hundreds of millions of computer users worldwide, recently added San Diego to a burgeoning group of cities on its new, and somewhat controversial, Street View service.
Part of Google Maps, Street View offers miles of panoramic, street-level images of streets here and in New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando, Fla. (Visit www.maps.google.com; click on Street View.)
So far, only major thoroughfares and streets in popular locales such as downtown, the beaches, Coronado and certain neighborhoods have been photographed. Google plans to fill in more streets before going back in the next few years to refresh the shots.
Officials at the Silicon Valley-based cyberspace Goliath say Street View, which is free, has been popular with users delighted by virtual urban walking tours.
The Net is also abuzz, to varying degrees of concern, over the incidental voyeurism provided by legions of camera crews fanning out on city streets madly clicking away.
What they shoot is what you get.
It could be minor embarrassments, like the love handles of a shirtless visitor relaxing on the Mission Beach sea wall or a clear image of a San Francisco man sneaking a smoke after he promised his wife he'd quit.
It also might be something potentially more serious.
Bloggers have pointed out, for instance, that certain New York bridges and tunnels where photography has been banned since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have shown up on Street View.
Some Street View subjects have been accused of overreacting to seemingly innocent images.
One Bay Area woman said a shot of her cat perched in the window of her second-floor apartment - now immortalized on various Web sites - ruffled her fur. "Where do you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people's lives?" she wondered in a newspaper interview.
During a summer in which a national debate rages over federal domestic-spying powers, Google's product has raised Orwellian issues about a nongovernmental source.
"George Orwell predicted (in his novel "1984") that it would be the all-seeing government eye watching over all of us," said Beth Givens of the San Diego-based nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
"But in reality, what we're seeing is private corporate endeavors being the more significant Big Brothers."
Givens said it is not hard to imagine that people might object to being unwittingly photographed, say, leaving a Planned Parenthood clinic or a gay bar. But most people won't even know they have been captured unless someone else spots their pictures and uses them online.
Google, which won't reveal what it is spending to provide its 360-degree images of urban America, insists that Street View photographers capture nothing more than what can be seen routinely in public during the day.
"All of our images are lawful," said Stephen Chau, product manager for Google Maps.
"They are taken by crews driving by slowly on public roads who photograph only images viewable by anyone walking down that street."
Chau said Google "takes privacy concerns very seriously." He emphasized that any government agency or citizen who objects to an image in Street View can ask that it be taken off the site.
"We review those requests, and we will take down the images, but there have been very few of those so far," Chau said, declining to give the number or nature of the requests. "The response overall has been tremendously positive."
Pam Dixon, executive director of the nonprofit public-interest research group World Privacy Forum in San Diego, said a similar service on a search engine run by Amazon.com ran into trouble by inadvertently showing women and children entering domestic-abuse shelters.
"Amazon responded and took the photos down," Dixon said. "Google has learned from that and worked with a national domestic-violence group before launching its service to make sure this did not happen again."
Dixon said there is no reason to be overly alarmed by the candid moments captured by Street View.
"To say this is the worst invasion of privacy ever wrought by technology is just not the truth," Dixon said. "This is a very legal application. Guess what, if you're standing in a public place - even your own yard - you can be photographed and the image can be put on the Web."
"The important thing to think about is whether this is what we want as a culture. I'd like to see some independent oversight, a public voice, someone not on Google's staff fielding questions about these images."
"Some objective review seems to me a fair compromise to make people more comfortable with shifting technology," Dixon said.
San Diego Union-Tribune staff librarian Michelle Gilchrist contributed to this report.
