Up-close, too personal

Japanese lawyers and professors have banded together to ask Google to stop providing street-level images of the country's cities online.

Google Street View lets Google Maps users zoom directly to the ground floor of certain cities, providing a photographic view of the area from the perspective of a pedestrian or driver. 12 Japanese cities have been profiled this way, as well as 50 US cities and certain parts of Europe, reports Reuters.

"We strongly suspect that what Google has been doing deeply violates a basic right that humans have," stated professor Yasuhiko Tajima of constitutional law at Sophia University of Tokyo.

"It is necessary to warn society that an IT giant is openly violating privacy rights, which are important rights that the citizens have, through this service."

Tajima spearheads the Campaign Against Surveillance Society, which seeks to persuade Google to delete all images of Japanese cities on Street View.

Japanese privacy advocates join a list of other countries that recently raised voice against Street View. After discovering last month's terrorist situation in Mumbai was planned in part with use of Google Earth, legal reprsentatives in India demanded that the country's High Court implement a "blur" on sensitive images on the service. Prior to that, operators of an Australian nuclear reactor voiced a similar request.

In March, Google complied with a request by the Pentagon to refrain from photographing military bases.

But privacy issues surrounding Street View aren't entirely political ones. Civilians expressed distress upon finding their images incidentally recorded in Street View. Such incidents included a woman shown subathing, and a man leaving a strip club in San Francisco.