With the expansion of Google Street View into a further eight US cities, more concerns have been raised over privacy issues.Among the cities added to the application were Boston, Dallas Fort Worth, Indianapolis and Minneapolis. In total, there are now 23 cities available for viewing and Google has stated that, eventually, it intends to extend Street View to cities and towns of all sizes across the world.
However, as the database of images captured on this application rise, so too do the privacy concerns surrounding them.
John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, stated: "As Google gets closer and closer to its stated goal of indexing all the world's information, more and more issues arise," the Boston Globe reports.
He added: "In the privacy realm, Google is asking people for a lot of trust. The ball is really in Google's court to prove they're not going to violate people's privacy."
However, product manager for Google Maps Stephen Chau stated that, while the critics had been vocal, Google had only received a couple of dozen requests from individuals seeking to remove images of themselves.
Last month, with the arrival of Street View in Australia, Rob Shilkin, Google Australia's head of corporate communications, attempted to allay privacy fears by stating that the firm is finding ways to ensure that people's faces are not identifiable in images captured in the country.
