There’s been a lot of talk about Google Street View lately and Google has received complaints from several countries for various reasons (USA, Australia, France, Italy, Australia and Thailand).  Last weekend the following image from Sherwood, Arkansas (US) was “captured” by the Google Street View team:

Even though it has received massive criticism the photo is still available.

In Thailand you can clearly identify persons “associating” with ladies of easy virtue (probably other places as well). Furthermore, photos of persons caught during personal crisis or under unfortunate circumstances seems to fire up under the debate whether this new map service is indeed an invasion of privacy.

Google on the other side claims that there isn’t such a thing as absolute privacy any more IF you are photographed and published while in public areas.

As far as I can understand this service is supposed to be a map service. Therefore I can’t understand why people and “events” should be displayed as they/it have/has nothing to do with the service itself. Concequently Google needs to “filter” this service before publishing in my opinion and only display what is really relevant.

Seeing your house on fire, or anyone doing something they’re not supposed to be doing for that matter doesn’t serve anyone any good. I understand the photo team has limited time in order to keep everything up to date, but then again they could replace some images with others (previously taken) if something out of the ordinary is taking place at the time of “capturing”.

What’s your take on this? And have you come across anything special on Google Street View’s lately?