time when Google is under intense scrutiny over its privacy policies.

Only recently, the company's chief, Eric Schmidt, sparked a new wave of Google-scepticism by conjecturing to the Financial Times about a time when his company had compiled enough personal data to know users better than they know themselves.

Privacy campaigners have responded to Street View angrily, pointing to the dangers of citizens being covertly photographed entering or leaving any number of discreet locations, from clinics to massage parlours. And there was a further troublesome complication for Google last week when it was reported that Google Earth satellite images were used by the alleged JFK bomb plotters.

Enthusiasts point out that there's nothing visible via Street View that a motorist or pedestrian wouldn't have been able to see by simply being

Users comb Street Views for images, from bikini sunbathers to colliding motorists

there at the time; and Google promise to remove offending images.

But there are already instances of controversial images being 'mirrored' (copied) by other websites before Google has a chance to remove them, and a whole new internet craze is emerging, in which users comb Street Views for interesting images, from bikini sunbathers to colliding motorists and street arrests.

Ultimately, this is just one aspect of a much larger debate about the trade-off between personal privacy and technological convenience.

To try Street View out for yourself, type San Francisco into the US (.com) version of Google Maps and zoom in. Click the Street View button and drag the little orange man to a location of your choice. Then either click the arrows or simply drag the image around to take advantage of the 360-degree perspective.

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