WHAT HAPPENS HERE IS NOW ON GOOGLE

Forget the airport. Internet users anywhere can click their way to a free trip to the Strip, minus the trip. Whether that's a good thing is up for debate.

This week, the popular Google Web site rolled out Street View, a program that offers 360-degree street-level images of Las Vegas and four other cities, allowing users to virtually tour the cities from a ground-level perspective.

"Users can virtually walk the streets of a city and preview destinations like restaurants and hotels before arriving," Megan Quinn, a spokeswoman for Google, said via e-mail Friday. "Our users have told us that this ability to view a location as if they were actually there helps them better understand and find information about the places they live and visit."

The new feature is technology's latest reach into spheres once limited by time and distance.

It's also caught the attention of Las Vegas Valley privacy advocates, who are keeping an eye on how far technology will go in monitoring people's lives. They find no legal problems with Street View.

"Especially in a town with a slogan 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,' people are sometimes unaware of the extent to which they're being monitored in public places," said Lee Rowland, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. "While we hope people take their privacy seriously, the courts have been pretty clear: If you can be seen in public, you don't have a reasonable right to privacy."

Quinn said Google takes "privacy very seriously. Street View only features imagery taken on public property. The imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street. Imagery of this kind is available in a wide variety of formats for cities around the world."

The other cities chronicled by Street View are San Francisco, Denver, New York and Miami.

"Our goal is to provide Street View imagery for regions throughout the world," Quinn said. "With this initial release, we've focused on major metropolitan areas."

Much of residential Las Vegas is missing from Street View.

Images are available from much of the Strip. Street View shows most major north-south and east-west streets, including large swaths of Flamingo Road, Tropicana Avenue, Sahara Avenue, Rainbow Drive, Eastern Avenue, Nellis Boulevard, Rainbow Boulevard and Craig Road, among others.

Also included are virtually all streets in a downtown Las Vegas area roughly bordered by Charleston Boulevard, Main Street, U.S. Highway 95 and Maryland Parkway. Freeways include U.S. 95, the Las Vegas Beltway and Summerlin Parkway in the western valley. Interstate 15 and U.S. 95 in the southern valley are not included.

Quinn did not say how much Street View cost to produce, or how many daily user "hits" it is receiving or is expected to receive.

She said the images are not real-time and were taken between a couple of months to one year ago by Google or hired help, using vehicles outfitted with cameras taking 360-degree images. Users can maneuver the images to take in scenes from various angles.

A Strip "tour" via Street View on Friday found some dated images. The Stardust hotel, which closed in November and was imploded in March, was still standing. Its marquee publicized an auction set for November.

Likewise, the Barbary Coast and Aladdin hotels had yet to be rethemed as Bill's Gamblin' Hall & Saloon and Planet Hollywood Resort, respectively.

A price marquee outside a Main Street Chevron station listed regular-grade gasoline at $2.32 per gallon, about a buck less than valley drivers are paying these days.

"We do plan on refreshing Street View imagery in the future," Quinn said.

Many of the images were grainy. License plates and facial features were difficult, if not impossible, to discern in some cases. At times, the position of the sun and shadows -- the Strip images appear to have been taken in the late afternoon, as the sun was low in the western sky -- rendered images almost unviewable.

Most of the passing scenes were fairly innocuous: tourists waiting to cross the street near the Monte Carlo hotel.

But on the street outside the Bellagio, clearly visible is a billboard truck advertising "Hot Babes, Direct To You," illustrated by a scantily clad lady on all fours.

Rowland said such images are fair game. "There doesn't seem to be a privacy issue here," she said. "It doesn't seem these pictures are excessively zooming on things people can't see from the streets."

Street View has a link where users can report "inappropriate" images that Google would then consider removing.

Quinn said "objectionable" images could include nudity, clearly identifiable people who request their images be removed, or "certain types of locations" such as domestic violence shelters.

"We respect the fact that people may not want imagery they feel is objectionable featured on this service," Quinn said. "We routinely review take-down requests and act quickly to remove objectionable imagery."

Rowland said a concern would be if Google found a way to profit by using images of people who hadn't given their consent to be photographed.