Monday, 04 Aug, 2008 Offbeat

The United States Legal and Policy Centre (NLPC) has purportedly taken the pictures of the house of Google co-founder Larry Page using the mapping service of his own company.

The exposure of images, where one can view "a top Google executive's address", is as a response to a recent court case held in Pennsylvania. The case is linked to privacy issues regarding the Google Street View.

Photos made using Google Street View unveiled the license plate of a Lexus and a Mercedes that were parked outside the property of Mr Page. At the same time using Google Earth's measure instrument, an aerial picture was taken, calculating the distance from the gate of the Californian mansion to the front door.

The NLPC also managed to map a driving route starting with the home of Larry Page and to Google offices nearby, including street-level images of every intersection on the route.

"There is no better evidence that individual privacy simply does not exist in Google’s world than by the chilling amount of detailed visual information Google now collects on all of us, information that any internet user can now compile in a dossier in less than 30 minutes," said in a statement accompanying the presentation of the photos the NLPC.

The NLPC document did not disclose the name and address of Google's co-founder, but according to a tech blog called Valleywag, the censorship could be uncovered quite easy with just a simple workaround.

According to a spokesman for Google Australia, the Street View service of Google features strong privacy safeguards, but did not give any comments regarding the issue.

"Anyone can flag imagery that they consider sensitive for removal, at the click of a mouse. Street View only contains imagery already visible from any public road and is not real-time," said the spokesman.

Source: News.com.au

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