Vancouver, Canada — In a service that raises privacy concerns in other countries where it has been implemented, and despite progressive talks with Canada’s privacy commissioner, search engine behemoth Google Inc. last week activated its controversial Street View mapping service to 11 cities in Canada, including Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa among other to millions of viewers over the Internet.
Canadians can now take a tour of their streets on Google’s Street View, which became live in Vancouver and several other Canadian cities last week.
The Vancouver Art Gallery, complete with hackeysack players. Courtesy: (Google Street View.)
Google Street View, which was originally debuted in May 2007, allows users to virtually navigate neighborhoods in 14 countries around the world. The Internet search giant’s Street View has come under severe firestorm since its launch for the service’s alleged potential to infringe the privacy of those people found in its images. When the service first launched, it was only available in five U.S. cities.
Images Google has been gathering since March in Toronto, Calgary, Banff, Alta., Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, Ottawa, Kitchener, Ont., Waterloo, Ont., and Vancouver – as well as Squamish and Whistler, B.C., in anticipation of the upcoming Winter Olympics – all have been posted to the popular Google Maps and Google Earth services.
To address that issue in Canada, Google said in a statement that it “has gone to great lengths to ensure Canadians’ privacy.”
The Mountain View, California, company said it has made numerous updates to its mapping service, including the ability for users to report problems, a pledge to permanently blur peoples’ faces in its database after a year, and an expansion of Street View.
Google has added a “Report a Problem” link on its maps and directions so that users can report inaccuracies: if, for example, the name of a park has changed, a road has been closed, or a particular building has been knocked down.
“Once we have received your edit or suggestion we will confirm it with other users, data sources, or imagery,” Andrew Lookingbill, a software engineer at Google, wrote in a blog post. “We hope to resolve each edit within a month.”
Meanwhile, the company is looking to add new datasets to Maps and is currently working on adding biking directions, Lookingbill wrote.
Submit your e-mail address, and Google will alert you when the change has been made.
Within hours of its launch, B.C.’s Information and Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis was calling Google over reports of instances in which its privacy protection measures had failed.
“We acknowledge that this tool may be of interest to people, but at the same time under the privacy law in B.C. there are issues that have to be addressed,” Loukidelis said in an interview.
He and other privacy commissioners in Canada are in talks over privacy concerns with Google for some time. “I am happy to see there has been movement by Google and other providers of images on license plates and faces and they have a take-down procedure; they have come a considerable way in an area where I have ongoing concern.”
Loukidelis said he would be communicating with the company over early reports of adults and children being clearly identifiable in Street View for Vancouver and his own concern over the area outside the Hotel Vancouver, where he said, “certainly if you were the person in the picture you would recognize yourself.”
“I will be following up with Google around the effectiveness of the blurring technology,” he said.
To view a Street View picture of a specific location, a user only need to enter the address and hit the search button.
A view of the Parliament Hill, Ottawa as seen on Google Street View. Courtesy: (Screen grab, Google Maps)
In an attempt to answer Canadian privacy concerns, the company said that all the images in Canada’s Street View are already visible from public roads. Identifiable faces and license plates were blurred to make certain that no one in the images could be identified.
But Anne-Marie Hayden, a spokeswoman for the Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart, said the commissioner wants Google to improve the blurring technology combined with accessible “take-down” features to allow people to get photos removed.
Moreover, Stoddart’s office is asking Google to make a more public effort to describe when, where and how long its camera cars will be in neighborhoods, so those who do not wish to appear on the service can ensure they are not accidentally captured in an image.
“In our view they could be doing more,” said Hayden. “We would like to see more investment in notification. Using various channels to reach more people. We want people to have more control and choice over whether their image is captured in a public place.”
But what if Google’s Street View cameras capture your image on the street?
The company has already pledged to blur out faces on the public version of Street View, but Google kept the un-blurred photos in its servers.
“We keep these un-blurred images in our databases so we can build better products, for example by constantly improving our blurring technology so that it obscures more of the things it should and less of the things it should not,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, wrote in a blog post. “For example, we might need to read a street sign in a Street View image to make sure that the street is properly named on Google Maps.”
Street View is already available for cities in a number of countries around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and some European countries. And Google cameras are cruising streets in an increasing number of cities as Google expands the service.
Street View drew praise from BC Tourism and some local businesses that see it as a plus for the city.
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson called it “a great boost to our tourism industry, giving people a glimpse of what they are in for when they visit Vancouver. It is great timing a few months before the 2010 Games.”
In a statement, Google Canada head Jonathan Lister did not directly responded to the privacy concerns, but stated that Street View has been “hugely popular” with users worldwide.
“Governments, businesses, and individuals across Canada use Google Maps and Google Earth every day as essential and informative tools: Street View now adds a new dimension,” he added.
Google declined requests for interviews.