As we’ve spoken about before, it seems like the issue of privacy is constantly in the news: whether its online privacy, and the issue of keeping your identity a secret; or real world issues such as CCTV in town centres, meaning that we are being constantly photographed. (With over 4m surveillance cameras in the UK, more per head than any other nation, we’re right to be concerned about these things.)

Now it appears that the online and offline privacy issues are about to come together with the arrival in the UK of Google Street View.

Google Street View is an attempt by Google to make maps more interactive. With Street View when you identify a place using a map, you can then zoom down and see what that location really looks like, using a photographic image. You can effectively see 3D views of a place from the ground. It’s a bit like when you switch from map view to aerial view on Google Maps – you can see what the place really looks like using a real image. Except this time it’s a ground level.

How do they do Street View? Well there really is no shortcut with this one. They have placed a 360 degree camera on the top of a car, and are driving round every street in the country, capturing a panoramic image from every single place.

That sounds like a long time spent in the car for someone! But I also think the final result sounds pretty cool too. If you look at a location on Google Maps in the USA, you will see that they have already completed a lot of the process over there.

However, the issue that’s creating trouble with privacy groups is that people are going to be caught on Google’s cameras, as the car drives past. Publishing a photo of someone (which putting it on the Internet equates to) without their permission is fraught with legal complications. In the US this has already enabled some towns to opt out of the Street View entirely – try and find street view for North Oaks, north east of Minneapolis, and there’s nothing there. There’s also a quite amusing case of a Pennsylvanian couple who took Google to court last year, for taking pictures of their house. Mr and Mrs Boring (brilliant, isn’t it!) had their case thrown out. Since then, Google have deployed a service called ‘deleted-on-request’. Last month they even tried out some face blurring techniques on images in New York.

Laura Scott of Google UK said “We know that privacy concerns are a big thing in the UK, but we feel that we’ve been open and honest. The service has been approved by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office”.

As Google maps is fully integrated, with WebEden, this is an issue that faces you too, when you’re using our Website creator system. If people use a map on your site to navigate, and then choose to include Street View, you as a publisher are endorsing Google’s system.

Do you think that privacy issues are important here? Or are privacy campaigners making a mountain out of a molehill? Leave us a comment below.