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The company launched Street View in 2007, providing a driver's perspective of streets in several US cities via Google Earth and Maps.

However, the technology immediately sparked a privacy debate, with many people concerned that they or their houses had been captured in intricate detail.

In one instance, a man was pictured exiting a San Francisco strip club. In another case, a woman was pictured

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sunbathing. Complaints have even included a woman asking that a picture of her cat be taken down.

In what appears to be an attempt to quell the privacy fears, Google has begun testing a face-detection technology that applies automatic blurring to the Street View images.

"This effort has been a year in the making," writes Google software engineer, Andrea Frome, on the company's LatLong blog. "Working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery."

The image blurring is the latest indication that Google is increasingly aware of the dangers of compromising its users' privacy. Last year the company's CEO, Eric Schmidt, warned the company could be in trouble if it lost users' trust.