In what at first seems like a replay of complaints in North America and Europe against Google’s controversial Street Views mapping service, a Japanese civil rights group is demanding that Google to stop the program in that country.

Street Views currently allows Google Earth users to take a virtual drive down any street in any of 50 major U.S. and European cities, accessing 360-degree views of the streetscapes.

Google has come under fire from individuals in North America and Europe whose faces appeared in Street View images. In addition the U.S. military has told Google to remove certain Street View images that pose a security threat to military installations.

Now, the Campaign Against Surveillance Society (CASS), a Japanese group headed by Yasuhiko Tajima, a professor of constitutional law at Sophia University in Tokyo, is demanding the Google stop providing Street View images of Japanese cities and delete all images of Japanese streets saved to date.

“We strongly suspect that what Google has been doing deeply violates a basic right that humans have,” Tajima told Reuters new service. The CASS is described as a group composed of Japanese university professors and lawyers.

Stay tuned…