Japanese protest against Google Street View

A collection of Japanese journalists, professors and lawyers have called on search engine giant Google to scrap its Street View service in Japan, claiming the service is an invasion of privacy.

A collection of Japanese journalists, professors and lawyers have called on search engine giant Google to scrap its Street View service in Japan, claiming the service is an invasion of privacy.

The group has sent a petition to Google’s Japanese office, demanding it withdraw the service from the country. Street View is a function on Google Maps that allows users to see real photographs of a selected location at street level.

The protestors wrote that Street View “constitutes violent infringement on citizens’ privacy by photographing residential areas, including community roads, and publishing their images without the consent of communities and citizens.”

They also complained Street View was distributing private information “more easily, widely, massively and permanently than ordinary cameras and surveillance cameras do”.

But Google says it already allows for the blurring out of faces on Street View if a person captured on camera does not wish to be identified.