GOOGLE plans to send its fleet of special cars fitted with panoramic cameras back on the road next month to update Street View Australia. Street View is an online tool that lets users take a virtual tour of landscapes from their computer by perusing an interactive database of millions of 360-degree snapshots.

Australia last year became the third country to be "scanned into" Street View, as much of the east and west coasts were added to the database. Now Google plans to roll out the camera cars again to take a new set of snaps over summer. "Starting from next month in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and parts of Tasmania, we'll be doing our best to cover as many of Australia's public roads as we can during this summer," said Google product manager Andrew Foster.

"If you're in the right place at the right time, you might spot one of our clearly marked Street View cars in your neighbourhood." Mr Foster also announced new privacy measures and imaging upgrades. "The images we're collecting this time will be crisper than before – making Street View even more useful when using it to find that restaurant you've forgotten the name of," he said.

"It will also make our face-blurring technology even more accurate, because faces and license plates will be easier for our blurring technology to recognise." Google introduced privacy measures including automatic face and license plate blurring after widespread complaints.

People who are uncomfortable with their image on Street View can also apply to have specific shots blurred or removed. Mr Foster said a new policy around complaints would see offending images permanently removed from Google's servers.

After a complaint, a blurred version of the image would be uploaded to Street View. The original image would be kept in Google's internal records for one year and then permanently replaced with the censored version, he said.