Google Street View Canada invasion
p2pnet news view Advertising | P2P:- “If your face was captured by Google’s Street View cameras in recent weeks, your mug is in the company’s image database — but it won’t be for long,” the head of Google Canada says, according to the CBC.
Oh Goody!
Wonder if that applies to middle fingers too? Because mine was raised when a Google SnoopMobile cruised my town on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, on Tuesday.
“The service, which provides close-up, 360-degree views of city streets as they would be seen by someone driving along them, is already available in nine other countries around the world and is expected to launch in Canada soon,” says the story.
Service? What service? Giant online advertising company Gargle is snapping Snoop-O-Ramas so it can display them over and over again around the world without ever having asked householders if that’s OK with them
The images, infrequently updated, are linked to the company’s Google Maps and Google Earth, says the CBC. But, “Operators will be standing by to handle complaints and remove compromising images within 24 hours,” says the Globe & Mail.
Compromising images?
“The pledge from the head of Google Canada to have extra staff on hand should be welcome news to Robert White, who has been fretting about unwanted exposure since April,” says the story. “That’s when he stepped naked in front of an open window after taking a shower just as a Google camera car rolled down the street.
“Mr. White raised the issue with his Nepean-Carleton MP, Conservative Pierre Poilievre, who passed the story along to Jonathan Lister, Google Canada’s managing director, during the executive’s appearance Wednesday before a House of Commons committee.”
According to Lister, Gargoyle technology, “automatically blurs faces and license plates that appear in its photos”.
Does it blur other parts too?
“If the software misses a face,” people can, “file a complaint and it will be addressed within 24 hours,” he says.
That’s if they even know. We saw the SnoopMobile purely by accident when we happened to be taking the dog for a walk.
Google, which has a truly evil reputation when it comes to user security and privacy, is a hard-core commercial advertising company and everything it does, everything, is in one way or another linked to that, no matter how it tries to spin it.
One of its PR people complained by email when I wrote, Huge advertising company Google figures it can go where it wants to go, do what it wants to do, and, that includes taking pictures of peoples` houses for use in online advertising projects without bothering to ask if it`s OK with the owners.
She said, Google Street View is not an online-advertising project, but rather a free feature of Google Maps and Google Earth which enables users to virtually explore and navigate a neighbourhood through panoramic street-level images. Would you be able to update the post on that point?
Sorry, Tamara, I can`t oblige, I said, stating, “As far as I`m concerned, your employer is a massive advertising agency and everything it does in some way impacts on that. And that includes Street View.”
It’s commercial, in other words. It’s a business corporation.
“Google takes privacy concerns extremely seriously,” the Globe and Mail quotes Lister as saying. “We’ve put world-leading privacy protections into the product.”
Product? Surely not? Tamara insists it’s a “service”.
In Germany, “Johannes Caspar, head of the Hamburg regional office for data protection, said Google had “agreed” to “erase the raw footage of faces, house numbers, license plates and individuals” who’ve told authorities they don’t want their information used, says the Associated Press.
In Canada, Lister says Google has now changed its image retention policy, says the CBC.
“We’re keeping them for as long as it takes to satisfy ourselves that we’ve been able to improve the software as much as possible,” he states.
How long would that would be? He couldn’t say. Nor did he explain precisely what “improving the software as much as possible” means. And “satisfying itself” is a little like a crook deciding whether or not he’s a crook.
“The privacy commissioner’s office had previously raised concerns about the fact that Google’s software did not always succeed in identifying and blurring faces and that Google kept the original images,” says the story, adding:
“Privacy advocates, including the office itself, have raised concerns that people might be photographed without their knowledge while entering sensitive locations such as abortion clinics or while engaged in embarrassing activities. After Street View first launched in the U.S. in 2007, Canada’s privacy commissioner warned that the service might not comply with Canada’s privacy laws.”
On that, Firms engaged in this kind of activity, `have to let citizens know that they are going to be photographing the streets of their city, when this will happen, why and how they can have their image removed if they don`t want it in a database,` says the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, releasing Captured on Camera to help Canadians understand privacy issues surrounding street-level imaging applications such as Google StreetView and a similar product offered by Canpages. (html, pdf)
Under Canadian privacy law you should know when your picture is being taken for commercial reasons, and what your image will be used for, says the commissioner`s office.
Google`s Street View is a commercial project, I’ve said before, and am saying again.
Not only but also, in my opinion, it’s a major invasion of privacy for Google to be shooting the images without first asking people if it’s OK with them.
Expecting us to Opt Out when we didn’t Opt In to begin with is typical Google.
But Hey! When you’re an 800-pound gorilla …
Jon Newton – p2pnet
(Thanks to everyone who emailed me …)
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June 18th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
LOL at the pic!
Now to read the story…
June 18th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Here’s the new Opt-In Google Street View;
http://i39.tinypic.com/vs2cra.jpg
Useful, huh?
August 26th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Its August 26 and still no Canada google street vew, when are we going to see us on the map……………..next year???