Google Street View April 2009

Google has added photo montages of 25 UK cities to Google Maps after its 'Street View' camera cars drove 22,000 miles of UK streets, photographing the surrounding environment as they went. Google has knitted together the resulting images to give a 360 degree navigable mosaic, enabling you to see a map location as if you are standing in the street itself. Already at the centre of some controversy, we explored Street View's capability and the issues it raises.

Driving down London's Piccadilly, looking at the house you grew up in, and working out your route from the train station are all now possibilities thanks to Google's Street View.

Google Maps

Google Maps is more than four years old - and its ease of use and visual clarity has established it as a leader in the mapping website market. Google Maps helps you plan walking, cycling, driving and public transport routes, and detailed maps and directions can be printed from a PC or laptop, allowing you to study your journey before you leave home, or have a passenger read out the instructions as you drive.

Sat navs are still more preferable for people driving alone, as reading from an A4 page of printed paper brings about some safety concerns. More information about Google Maps can be found in our Google Map advice guide.

Street View is an additional function of Google Maps, which is new to the UK - and cities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland now join cities from another eight countries worldwide that Google has so far covered with its camera cars.

Google Earth

Maximum zoom in Google Maps no longer takes you to just the 1cm-25m scale - with its familiar font, blocky areas of greenery and stubby cul-de-sacs. Instead with the addition of Street View, you are dropped into a photo of the street that you have zoomed into; the bird's eye view of Google Earth turned horizontally and enlarged. 

Using the keyboard's arrow keys or the mouse lets you rotate Street View images, look up and down them, and zoom in through three levels of magnification. Hold down an arrow key and you move down streets on the lines driven by Google in 2008 – at the speed of a fast cyclist. You can also click and drag 'Pegman', Google’s icon for Street View, onto your destination in the inset street map, with all the streets covered by Street View edged in blue. 

Street View lets you explore the UK’s four capitals, and 21 of its other cities in enough detail to read advertising at bus stops. Coverage varies: metropolitan London, Glasgow and Edinburgh are comprehensively covered; Dundee, Aberdeen and Norwich have substantial coverage of their hinterlands too. But large parts of Leeds, Manchester and Bristol have been left un-photographed.

Privacy versus functionality

Additions to standard Google Maps features are a usefully accurate address generator, thumbnails of user photos and a 'report a problem' link.

That 'report a problem' link is at the centre of the controversy Street View has stirred. It first appeared a year after Google first introduced Street View – in the US in 2007 – and the company has since made it simpler to use.

Clicking on it takes you to a clearly laid-out form, which only takes a few moments to fill in. We did this with several unblurred images of faces and number plates, and found them all more heavily blurred or removed by Google within 24 hours.

Blurring faces and number plates

The pressure group Privacy International has gone further, complaining to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about Street View's failure to blur faces sufficiently. Before launching Street View in the UK, Google obtained the ICO's blessing for Street View, which hinged on effective blurring of number plates and faces.

Our first look review found that that while most number plates are blurred, many faces are still visible.

Google describes Privacy International's complaint as 'an empty and entirely predictable publicity stunt'. The ICO said that it is 'Google's responsibility to ensure all vehicle registration marks and faces are satisfactorily blurred' and that anyone who is not satisfied with Google's response to a complaint can take the matter to the ICO.

Pros: Enables you to see 'visit' unfamiliar towns and plan routes

Cons: Many people are concerned about the invasion to privacy, some blurring appears to be insufficient

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