In its early days, the Internet reminded me of shortwave radio -- the more distant the station, the more thrilling the reception. Being able to exchange fast e-mail with someone in Australia was miraculous.

But as we've become familiar with fast networking, the focus has curiously looped back upon itself. Google can map the planet, but in some ways, the streets and buildings in our own locale are more noteworthy. Think of the mapping services we routinely use to find our ways to appointments or engagements with friends.

I routinely use Google's Street View to find where I'm going. Where it's available, Street View lets you move through the landscape with actual photographs of what you'll see. It's a terrific feature if, like me, you tend to drive right by your destination without recognizing it.

Available via maps.google.com, the service is not without controversy, the most recent being the actions of the Minnesota town of North Oaks, which demanded that Google remove its imagery from the database. North Oaks is a small community whose roads are privately owned. Google was quick to comply.

North Oaks' complaint reminds us of other concerns about Google photos, including complaints from privacy advocates that car license plates and faces were visible in some of the shots. Google has been sued because of photographs of at least one home in Pittsburgh.

The company has begun blurring faces on an experimental basis, with Manhattan as the test case, even as it prepares for the introduction of Street View in Europe. This is interesting technology, because getting computers to recognize faces is a long-standing problem. The application took more than a year to develop.

What about privacy?

At work is a software algorithm that hunts through Google's pictorial archive to find faces in scenery and make sure they're not recognizable. I suspect it's going to take quite a lot of testing to get this right, with privacy issues continuing to surface in the interim.

Get ready for 3-D imaging, because the company is already collecting data in that format.

The problem with collecting visual data is that despite the privacy question, these services are proving indispensable. We're willing to weigh the issues when technology brings a new level of usefulness. But what happens when the pictures being taken are of value only to an advertiser?

The question is raised by companies like Quividi, a Paris firm that is equipping billboards with cameras that take pictures of people walking past. The idea is to figure out how effective a particular billboard is at selling a product.

You can do that without necessarily saving images of particular faces. Indeed, what's going on is the evaluation of less personal matters, such as gender and age, by software, which can then use that information to choose among different advertising pitches. The billboards are still experimental. The goal seems to be to make street advertising more and more targeted, something the Internet has made simple by following Web behavior, but which traditional billboards have until now not been able to accomplish.

The privacy issue won't go away, because the imagery that leads to the relevant software decisions is still being collected and ending up on servers somewhere. The question: How comfortable are we with having cameras recording our actions for the convenience of someone trying to sell us products? I'm always surprised when people tell me they don't mind their Internet behavior being tracked if it results in easier access to the things they want.

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