That search engine's former chief executive, Udi Manber, now works for Google. launched a similar mapping feature in January 2005 on a search engine called A9.com. Google certainly isn't the first company to venture down this photographic avenue. "Imagery of this kind is available in a wide variety of formats for cities all around the world." "This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street," Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn said in a statement. The photos will be periodically updated, but the company hasn't specified a timetable for doing so. To guard against privacy intrusions, Google said all the photos were taken from vehicles driving along public streets during the past year. The feature provides high-resolution photos to enable street-level tours so users can get a more realistic, 360-degree look at places they might go or spots where they already have been. The Mountain View-based company already is planning to expand the service to other U.S. Google is hoping to elicit "oohs and ahhs" with Street View, which was introduced on its maps for the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami earlier this week. "Everyone expects a certain level of anonymity as they move about their daily lives," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group devoted to protecting people's rights on the Internet. Potentially embarrassing or compromising scenes like these are raising questions about whether the Internet's leading search engine has gone too far in its latest attempt to make the world a more accessible - and transparent - place. In other cities, you can see men entering adult book stores or leaving strip joints.
In Miami, there's a group of protesters carrying signs outside an abortion clinic. In San Jose, there's the rather sad sight of a bearded man apparently sleeping - or did he just pass out? - in the shadow of a garbage can, with what appears to be an empty cup perched in front of him. Further down the highway at Stanford University, there's the titillation of a couple coeds sunbathing in their bikinis.
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