KEY POINTS:
If, while walking down a street, you see a vehicle with a top-heavy pole sticking out of its roof, do not be alarmed.
It is not a UFO or a van checking parking permits, but a Googlecam. As it proceeds, the eight cameras mounted on the top of the pole take an endless succession of digital pictures of the road and its environs. Each image is tagged with its precise location using GPS.
When the car returns to base, all the images and their GPS data are uploaded to Google, which then overlays them on Google Maps. The idea is that you type in a location and - Bingo! - you can see what you'd see if you were driving in that neighbourhood. In fact I've just taken a virtual drive round Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, something of a holy place for us ageing hippies.
Welcome to Google's Street View, which is currently available in some US cities and probably due in a lot more soon. The prospect that it might be coming to the rest of the world has got the right-wing London-based Daily Mail newspaper into a lather.
This sinister technology, it raves, "could be a privacy-invading nightmare". Google's cars "will photograph every door in Britain".
The service "will allow anyone in the world to type in an address or post code and instantly see a 360-degree picture of the street".
It will include close-ups of buildings, cars and people. Critics say the site is a "burglar's charter" that makes it easy for criminals to check out potential victims.
Given that the Mail has been gung-ho about Britain's addiction to CCTV cameras, its newfound worry about privacy is laudable, but the grounds for its concern are puzzling.
After all, Google Maps and Google Earth already provide invaluable information for burglars; they show who has swimming pools and unprotected back gardens, for example.
It's not clear, however, if Googlecam would be legal in Europe because EU data-protection and privacy rules are more stringent than those in America.
In Europe, litigation could be triggered by, say, images of an ageing rock star entering a rehab clinic, or by even more "sensitive" pictures: the chap who's "off sick" out shopping or the adulterer tending her lover's roses.
And it doesn't matter that the pictures were taken in a public place.
"If you are caught on camera and complain to Google," says Struan Robertson of UK lawyers Pinsent Masons, "Google will remove the pics. But that may not be enough for Europe's courts. Our data protection regime lets us take holiday snaps, even of strangers, provided we're doing so for private purposes.
"But if we're taking snaps for commercial use, where individuals are identifiable, there is no such exemption. We need to notify the subjects, and that's hard for Google to do. Even a loudspeaker on top of the camera cars ["Hi, it's Google here, say cheese everybody!"] might not suffice"'
Quite. But in a way the issue is not whether this Google innovation is permitted or not, but the general direction we're heading and the role Google might play in our collective future.
The direction is towards a world in which everything we do is monitored and logged - mostly by one company.
Google's mission, according to its corporate website, is "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
What we perhaps haven't fully realised is that these guys really mean it.
Their ambition is at least as megalomaniacal as Bill Gates' vision of a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. So it's time we started thinking about what a world dominated by Google would be like.
As it happens, some people have - and they've been publishing the results on YouTube. See them at tinyurl.com/5v43y6. Then pour yourself a stiff drink.
- OBSERVER
