The Thailand photos cannot be credited to Google, but instead to a different, much smaller service called MapJack - www.mapjack.com. 

This is a startup company with obviously much less capital, as cities are slowly added. However, the imagery is incredibly sharp and there is no face/license place blurring. I wonder when they'll be discovered by the privacy advocates living in the few cities they feature?

And then there's 360cities.net. These folks are taking 360-degree panoramas of off-street locations and again, no face blurring.

The fire truck is already there? As for the comment about taking the photo, wouldn't that be done automatically anyway? I can't see somebody sitting in the car going 'click click' every few metres.

i easily see the problem, people are worried that once the house is burned down they can no longer figure out the pictures on the street.

...the way I read it first it seemed like they were doing nothing about it, but if you look at the picture you see a fire truck already fighting the fire - so where is the problem?

I mean burning houses are part of life and at the moment the car went by the street looked exactly like that.