Street View now live in 50 countries after adding Lesotho, Hungary

Google Street View is now live in 50 countries after taking the product live in Lesotho and Hungary today.

That’s not bad going for a product that started out in a handful of US cities back in 2007. Today it covers over five-million miles (just over eight-million kilometres) and includes photos of cities, great wildernesses, parks and mountain tops.

According to Google, this is also the largest single update of Street View imagery it’s ever pushed, including new and updated imagery for nearly 350 000 miles of roads across 14 countries. It’s refreshed and expanded existing Street View coverage in France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore and Thailand.

It also says there’s a new special collections of a host of picturesque spots—using caught using its Street View Trike technology — that include Portugal’s Pena National Palace, or the Sha Tin Che Kung Temple in Hong Kong or the Kilkenny Castle in Ireland.

Things have not however always gone smoothly for the mapping project. Back in 2010, it pledged to strengthen its privacy and security practices after its “Street View” mapping service gathered private wireless data, including emails and passw