SO Google says it observes UK laws, Guardian, May 2.

Judging by the Guardian’s photograph of the street view car, it is breaking at least one law by parking on the pavement and if as appears the French registered car has no road tax and has been on the streets of Britain for more than six months, it is breaking another by evading the vehicle excise duty and Google should be charged by the police accordingly.

What, of course, is intolerable, is the acquiescence and collusion of the authorities and Parliament in permitting this invasion of privacy. I see that many people, rightly in my opinion, are complaining about Google Street View, but I wonder how many of those same people also support that other great invasion in our lives, CCTV cameras? How many times do you hear people come up with the usual cliche, ‘I’ve got nothing to hide why should I object?’ What never ceases to surprise me about this attitude is that these people never think of asking the question ‘why should they be filmed if they’ve done nothing wrong?’ And before the proponents of CCTV jump unquestioning to its defence, consider that the House of Lords Constitution Committee in its recent report Surveillance: Citizens and the State, recommended that the Home Office commissioned an independent appraisal of the existing research evidence on the effectiveness of CCTV, noting that both Liberty and Justice have expressed concerns about CCTV remaining largely unregulated and that the Council of Europe has said that strong regulation is necessary if human rights are to be protected from overly intrusive CCTV surveillance.

RICHARD BUTTREY Stockton Heath