Japanese privacy advocates object to Google's Street View

The Campaign Against Surveillance Society said that it has written to Google to ask it to discontinue the service in Japan and that it violates citizens' privacy.

Street View was first launched in US cities but has been launched by Google in cities all over the world. Car-mounted cameras take 360 degree photographs of streets every few metres and the photographs are published online.

Users of Street View can view the photographs and can take a virtual photographic tour of streets which have been documented.

Yasuhiko Tajima is a professor of constitutional law at Sophia University in Tokyo and is the head of The Campaign Against Surveillance Society.

"We strongly suspect that what Google has been doing deeply violates a basic right that humans have," Tajima told news agency Reuters. "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."

Concerns about privacy have been expressed in relation to Street View in a number of countries. Google has defended its right to take photographs of public places, and has begun to use face-blurring software to help make people less identifiable. The company also said that people can request the removal of photos from the site if they are in them.

"Street View only features photographs taken on public property and the imagery is no different from what a person can readily see or capture walking down the street," said Google's statement about privacy and Street View.

"Blurring technology and operational controls like image removal are among the ways in which we ensure that an individual's privacy is respected. We make it easy for users to ask to have photographs of themselves, their children, their cars or their houses completely removed from the product, even where the images have already been blurred," it said.

In the UK, Lobby group Privacy International said this summer that it thought that the use of people's faces for commercial ends required their permission.

Google pointed out, though, that its use of face-blurring technology meant that it was not breaking the law.

The service was cleared in the UK by privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

"We are satisfied that Google is putting in place adequate safeguards to avoid any risk to the privacy or safety of individuals, including the blurring of vehicle registration marks and the faces of anyone included in Street View images," said a statement from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in August of this year.