The latest phase in Google's mission to organise the world's information — thousands of street-level photographs of major American cities — has raised questions that the search engine is invading people's privacy.

The new feature on Google's map service, called "Street View", was unveiled this week at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California, but within hours of the photographs of downtown San Francisco and New York hitting the internet, bloggers were posting images of people, their faces visible, being arrested, sunbathing and urinating in public.

Posting on the website, Boing Boing, one resident of Berkeley, California, Mary Kalin-Casey said that she decided to see what her flat looked like on the site and was surprised to come across a highly detailed photograph of her cat, Monty, sitting in the window.

Expert View
 Given that British life is now essentially a series of Orwellian performances, I'm strangely unbothered by the privacy implications
Michael Parsons
The web is built on a lack of privacy
"I'm all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes," she wrote. "I feel like I need to close all my curtains now. I'm going to look into whether it's possible for a person ...   more »

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Sunday for the creation of a new world economic order that gives greater clout to fast-growing emerging nations.
Days after attending a Group of Eight summit in Germany, Putin suggested that club was outdated and failed to reflect a shift in economic power away from the industrialised West to countries like his own.
"If 50 years ago, 60 pct of the world's gross domestic product came from the G7, now it's the other way round, and 60 percent of the world's GDP is produced outside," Putin said in a speech to a major economic conference.
He also took aim at financial organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, saying they were created in "a completely different reality" and had lost relevance in the fast-changing global economy.
Russia is enjoying an unprecedented spell of economic growth that has enabled it to pay down its foreign debts and accumulate foreign exchange reserves of over $400 billion -- the world's third largest.
Putin said the world needed to reduce its dependency on the dollar as a reserve currency, and plugged the rouble as one alternative. Russia abolished capital controls ...   more »