Google acquires BC data — for free
The British Columbia government and Google have teamed up in a partnership the former says will help the public, “plot out everything from campsites to coal reserves on free customizable maps”.
However, with Google, there’s no such thing as ‘free’ and somewhere, somehow, BC citizens will pay, whether they know it or not.
“The province calls the system GeoBC and said it brings together otherwise hard-to-find government data previously accessible only through complicated and specialized mapping software,” says the Times Columnist, going on:
The government data warehouse, “holds a bounty of data on B.C.’s Crown land, including park boundaries, air-quality reports, logging roads, airfields, underground pipes and wires, wildlife habitat areas, campgrounds, forest tenures and areas designated as coal, mineral and gas reserves,” says the story,
British Columbia is the first Canadian province to provide Google with access to its detailed databases, and according to Mark Zacharias, GeoBC executive director, Google achieved this without having to pay anything.
“The province does not have the capacity or resources to put everything online itself, and so benefits from being able to use Google technology already on the desktops of most computer users, said Zacharias,” according to this story.
Whether or not “most computer users” already use Google desktop technology is, of course, very much open to question. Desktop been the subject of serious privacy concerns since day one.
“The long-term plan for GeoBC is to expand into mapping social data, such as education and health care,” says Zacharias in the story.
Looked at from another perspective, if the BC government/Google collaboration continues, it won’t be long before Google, a purely commercial company wtih purely commercial vested interests, has full and complete access to private and personal BC citizen and other data.
Says the story:
“B.C.’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner isn’t sure what it thinks about the deal with Google, because it wasn’t consulted, said Mary Carlson, executive director. ‘I think it would be worth an inquiry in the future,’ she said.”
Last summer, Google was the only company to completely fail an important six-month investigation into privacy practices employed by key Net-based companies.
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Times Columnist – Google, province team up on online mapping database, July 19, 2008
completely fail -Google flunks major privacy study, June 11, 2007
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