One more bad thing: it's led to yet more tired overuse of1984references. Orwell must be rolling his grave.

Question: Is Google Street View...

• An amazing piece of technological achievement, unrivalled in the history of the Internet, or:
  
• Terrifyingly creepy?

Answer: Yes.

Let's be clear on a couple of points. Google undoubtedly has every right in the world to take photos in public spaces, and to make those photos freely available to anyone who wants to see them. It's a right that photographers have enjoyed pretty much since photography was invented, and it is an important part of our freedom of expression that we can photograph those things that some people would rather we not photograph. Inconvenient it may sometimes be, but that's part of the price of a free society.

What's more, the technological advances that have made Street View possible are nothing short of stunning. Digital cameras have been around in some form since the '70s, GPS since the '90s, and 360-degree photographs since at least 1980. Yet all these elements only came together in 2007, when Google launched Street View in the States and allowed thousands of people to walk haltingly along rather pixelated virtual streets, gawking at their surroundings in a way that previously they could have done only by, well, actually going there.

So Street View is undoubtedly a good thing in those respects. But — and this is important — although something might be legal, and although it might be cool, that does not necessarily make it a sensible thing to do. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Google may have something to learn from Facebook here.

Facebook has the capability to simultaneously stir deep, virulent rage and fanatical loyalty within the hearts of its users. They may log in every day to tirelessly check their status, but change the layout by a single pixel and they will have no mercy. You'd have thought that the site's owners would notice this, but apparently not — back in 2006, they seemed genuinely surprised that their proud unveiling of the News Feed feature, which gathered data from all of a user's friends and presented it in a very information-rich format, was greeted with sheer horror by thousands of users.

Facebook's response to the unprecedented amounts of bile pouring towards them was simply "But you put this information here in the first place! Why are you angry that people can see it?" On the face of it, that's not unreasonable. What they failed to take into account, though, was that the context in which that information had been put onto the site was very different to the context in which it was now being presented, perhaps to the point that users would not have entered that information had they known it would be broadcast to everyone they vaguely knew.

It was an easy mistake to make, to be fair. Cultural standards are frequently illogical and inflexible — clothing styles that would be seen as modest on a Hawaiian beach would be taken as a sign of disgusting immorality in conservative Middle Eastern countries, for example — and on the Internet, cultures spring up, clash and meld at terrifying rates. Facebook's owners had spent years in an environment where they were dealing every day with tons of personal information, and they had lost sight of the value that their users put on it.

In the same way, Google, caught up in their excitement at this Really Cool Thing, didn't realise that there are some things that people simply would not have done if they knew they'd be visible to anyone and everyone. That doesn't need to imply that these things are embarrassing or immoral in themselves — if I were, for instance, going out with someone but hadn't told anyone because I wasn't sure whether it would work out, I wouldn't necessarily want pictures of me at a romantic candlelit dinner being splashed onto the Internet where certain rather excitable members of my family could see them. (Yes, that example is entirely hypothetical. Calm down.) Privacy isn't something that is required only when you're doing something questionable, it's something that we can and should be able to expect at all times.

It's not a new concept — if I may go all Scriptural for a second, Paul says in 1 Corinthians that "everything is permissible for me — but not everything is beneficial." Street View is immensely cool (hey, look, you can even see the bike racks we installed on the house in Oxford where I lived in 2007!) and it's also legal. It's just not necessarily a very good idea, and I really hope they can work out the kinks so that it can be another classic Google product: awesome, and only a tiny bit evil.