Google Maps redraw the realm of privacy

Google Inc. has been watching you, Southern California.

A caravan of cars and trucks mounted with cameras has been driving city streets for months, snapping close-up photographs of homes, shops and public places.

Any people who got in the way became subjects in Google's version of "Candid Camera."

The Internet company late Monday began incorporating street-level photos from Los Angeles, San Diego and some Orange County cities into its Google Maps program. The additions expanded an online service that thrilled some digital-map buffs and freaked out privacy advocates when it launched in May in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York and three other cities.

The photos can help people scout out places they plan to visit. But when Google's camera shutters click, they capture more than buildings.

Within hours of the first release, bloggers had found and posted photographs -- which are often sharp enough to identify the people in them -- of vulnerable moments: students sunbathing in bikinis at Stanford University, motorists being ticketed by police, a man walking into an adult bookstore in Oakland, even a man picking his nose on a San Jose park bench.

In Los Angeles, it could create a new sport: celebrity hunting on Google Maps.

"It is a visual reminder of how our private spaces are really shrinking," said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a San Diego advocacy group. "We've never had the expectation of privacy in public places, but it's the technology that causes us to reexamine this. Computers have very long memories."

The so-called Street View program is part of Google's effort to organize all the world's information, including visual data about the planet on which we live.

In Los Angeles, Google trucks have photographed major thoroughfares from Santa Monica to downtown. Street View also now covers parts of Anaheim, Long Beach, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Laguna Niguel and San Diego. Other cities included in Monday's expansion were Houston and Orlando, Fla.

Google users can find the photos by entering addresses into maps.google.com, then clicking on the "Street View" button.

Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., says the pictures are useful. Real estate shoppers can inspect homes and neighborhoods. Diners can see a restaurant's location on a block. Friends can pinpoint a meeting place.

"I've used it to choose between two different hotels in New York," said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.