Users can see snapshots of life on Earth that range from something as innocent as a child playing on a swing in a Sydney park to a secret nuclear submarine base in China. "I don't really think it's tipping the balance in favour of the bad guys," John Hanke, the director in charge of Google Earth and Google Maps, said in an interview.

"The evilness is in the philosophies and the desires of those that want to do evil. They will use the tools at hand to do that, whether it's throwing a Molotov cocktail, or shooting a rifle or using some piece of technology as part of the process." The comments made by Hanke during our interview at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, this month represent his most public contribution yet to the debate about the use of modern information technologies by the "bad guys" - as he put it. They come at a time when India is investigating the circumstances surrounding November's deadly attack on Mumbai, amid a chorus of calls for access to the service to be restricted or banned entirely.

In December, a petition entered at the Mumbai High Court alleges that Google Earth "aids terrorists in plotting attacks" and asked that Google be directed to blur images of sensitive areas pending all full hearing. The Jerusalem Post reported in December that a documentary called The Field of Death posted on the Hamas military wing's website showed terrorists using Google Earth to plot a rocket attack on a fuel depot inside Israel last April that killed two men.

To avoid knee-jerk reactions, Hanke cautioned that it was important to understand if what people were doing with these tools was any different from what they would have done anyway. "If Google Earth didn't exist, would they have used a tourist map they could have bought or was the real intelligence actually coming from an on-the-ground informant who was working in the hotel and drawing layouts of everything on a napkin?" he said. "You have cars; you have car bombs. You have GPS transceivers that help you navigate; those GPS transceivers could be used for lots of nefarious purposes. Cell phones have all kinds of benefits; cell phones can be used to detonate a remote explosive device."

While this debate had "mostly died off" in the West, it was still a live issue in countries where the "government is used to controlling everything", Hanke said. Often this concern was a pretext for a government trying to reassert control over its "closed information societies", he said.

"The idea that open information is valuable is more baked onto Western culture," he said. "You have top down command and control types of governments like those in China to some extent and in Russia and legacies of that in places like India where these issues at the government level are more prevalent for us." He also expressed the view that the concerns raised about personal privacy on the new Street View feature on Google Maps was largely tied to the novelty of the products and a lack of understanding about the nature and frequency of the intrusion. Street View is a free online feature that gives users a continuous ground-level street panorama.

"We went through a cycle with satellite imagery where it was new and there was some level of concern and then some level of hyped-up concern, I would say, about what it means," he said. "And as people came to understand about what satellite imagery did and about what it didn't [do], that level of concern went down and, as people began to appreciate the value it brought to them, that became effectively a non-issue.

"If you know that this satellite can come over maybe once a year and it takes a picture, that's different from believing there's an eye in the skye that can follow wherever you go all of the time." Google last year incorporated a process that automatically blurs faces of people and licence plates of cars whose photographs appear on Street View. Google will also remove "objectionable" images. Those privacy concerns reared up again this week when it was revealed that the Street View feature on Google Maps contained an image of a man sitting on his outhouse dunny in an inner-city Melbourne backyard.

The photo was snapped by a camera mounted on the roof of one of a fleet of specially kitted-out cars that Google dispatched around the country in late 2007 and early 2008 to capture images for Street View. Google swiftly removed the image from Street View once it was noticed, but on the internet it is almost impossible to obliterate all traces of something you don't want seen.

Google is facing opposition to its latest geo technology in Germany, where Street View has yet to be launched, and in Japan, where it was launched last year. "With Street View, it's going through the same cycle of people understanding exactly what it is and what it isn't and ... what they shouldn't really be concerned about," he said.