A man who entered a sex shop is publicly visible, thanks to google’s street view! Another image shows police arresting a man. Google has been forced to remove pictures like these from their Street View service due to the protests from the people citing that they have not given their permission for the Images.

A Google spokesperson has informed the BBC that any person may request deletion of their image available in the Google Maps service, which covers 36,000 miles of streets and roads of over 25 cities in the UK. “We have millions of images so that the percentage of which we have removed is negligible,” said the spokesman. The images have been replaced by black screens.

The system allows Internet users to zoom and view the streets as if they were they are watching the rest of the world live. In Spain, the service covers the cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla, Zaragoza and Oviedo. The project has attracted criticism from groups like Privacy International, according to whom “the images have been captured without the permission of the people for commercial use, which is not acceptable from a legal standpoint.”

The Information Commissioner of the British Government had given its approval for the project proposed by Google, arguing that the U.S. company had developed a series of safeguards to ensure privacy, such as blurring the faces of people or license plates of cars. Street View was launched in the United States in May 2007 and it operates in Italy, France, Holland, Japan, Australia, New Zealand.