As you may know, we're aiming to launch the Street View feature for Google Maps in Australia, later in 2008. Sydney was where Google Maps had its origins, so we're very excited to be bringing the feature here. Street View is a popular Google Maps feature that allows people to view and navigate 360 degree street-level imagery of cities and towns.
Google Maps and Google Earth have proven incredibly popular with Australians and are used by Governments, businesses and individuals as essential and informative tools every day of the week. Street View provides an added experience by enabling you to see a location as you would if you were standing on the street.
It's been a highly requested feature that will help people discover and explore parts of Australia (and may even help you with your home hunting).
At Google, we take our users' privacy very seriously. Street View only contains imagery that anyone can already see walking down a public street and we've always had in place image removal tools. In addition, today, on the Google LatLong blog, we have just announced the first public test of our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making - and we will continue to work hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery. Here's an example from the bustling streets of Manhattan:
In Australia (and New Zealand), Street View will also feature face-blurring, as well as image removal tools.
Recently, we have had very positive and productive discussions with the Australian Privacy Foundation about Street View and some of the issues they had raised. They were supportive of the efforts that we're making to safeguard privacy, including community outreach and product design. We're definitely looking forward to continuing to work constructively with them as we get closer to launch.
In the meantime, as winter approaches in Australia, you can enjoy going for a virtual walk through some of the many sunny US cities that are already featured. Safe travels!
