Your life on Google Street View

If you parked your car outside your mistress's house some time between January and last week, be afraid.

For Google Street View New Zealand launches today offering tens of millions of searchable, street-level photos (details in our Technology section here).

Google-branded Holden Astras mounted with cameras have been cruising New Zealand streets since January to capture photos for the new service.

After Street View launched in the US, many sites sprang up featuring galleries of embarrassing moments and oddities caught by the service's camera cars (see above, below and, even more excruciatingly, here), from people entering houses of ill repute to burglaries in progress. Arrows allow people to navigate or zoom in and out of multiple photos of the same street scene.

The process of capturing New Zealand street scenes was fully-automated, due to the tens of millions of photos churning through the system, says Google ANZ product manager Andrew Foster, with no manual review of any pictures ahead of the service going live today - although Google's system does use software that should automatically blur faces and license plates in most instances (in some overseas instances, it seems to have decapitated people altogether).

The angle and resolution of Street View photos also means faces and license plates are not normally visible, says Mr Foster.

However, Google did work with the Privacy Commissioner's office, womens' refuge and homeless groups to draw up photo use guidelines, says the company's ANZ PR manager Annie Baxter.

Through links on any offending Street View photo, you can request that your face, or your license plate or even house be removed from the service.

Changes should be made within hours, if Google can verify your identity offline.

Mr Foster says such requests could lead to a whole photo being taken off the site, with privacy concerns trumping Google's urge to provide the convenience of a complete view of any street.

Google's ultimate answer to privacy charges is that photos are not real-time - they could capture a street any time since January - and all photos were taken on public roads. "There's nothing you couldn't have seen when driving around yourself," says Ms Baxter.