p2pnet news view P2P | Advertising:- Google has added St John’s, Sherbrooke, London, Sudbury, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Nanaimo and Victoria to its list of Canadian cities spammed on its Google Street View, “a feature of Google Maps and Google Earth that shows high-resolution street-level images,” as Digital Homes sums it up.

Other Google-stalked Canadian cities include Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, Vancouver, Squamish, Whistler, Ottawa Kitchener and Waterloo.

“The service which provides panoramic views of street from a height of about 2.5 metres was launched in May of 2007 and is now available over ten countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia and Japan,” says the story.

Google says people don’t have to worry about seeing their actual faces, or things like license plates, clearly revealed online because its “advanced technologies” single out and blur the pics it took and displayed without permission.

Swiss authorities wouldn’t agree.

They’re suing Google for failing to adequately obscure imaging.  And the man in the pic on the right wouldn’t agree either.

p2pnet reader Marc, who’s been virtually walking the Google streets, copied it, and a number of others, and the only reason it’s blurred is because p2pnet did Google’s work for it. In the untreated pic, the man is clearly recogniseable.

“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. And, “Operators will be standing by to handle complaints and remove compromising images within 24 hours,” said the Globe & Mail at the time.

That works. Marc’s property is one of those improperly displayed by Google and the company agreed to remove it.

“Hello,” the Google ‘team’ told Marc when he asked for shots of his house to be taken down >>>

According to our records, you recently submitted a report regarding an inappropriate image in Street View on Google Maps.

We’re currently reviewing the material you reported to determine whether the image should be removed from the product.

We appreciate your assistance.

Googlers would ‘determine’ if the image should be removed? Marc’s wishes weren’t enough? And what about all the other faces and license plates?

Snapped by a SnoopMobile

Jonathan Lister, Google Canada’s managing director, told a House of Commons committee its auto-blur technology “automatically blurs faces and license plates that appear in its photos and if it ‘misses a face’ people could ‘file a complaint’.”

So far, it appears to be extremely hit and miss, with an awful of of misses. Certainly, the pix we have in our growing collection of non-blurs are a tiny tip of a huge iceberg.

A Google SnoopMobile cruised my town on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, and we saw the car purely by accident when we happened to be taking the dog for a walk. Otherwise, we’d never have known.

Sneak View victims can ask to have their pix removed only if they know they’ve been photographed. So, “Is Google is the Facebook of pix that can come back to haunt you?” – wonders Marc.

Google PR lady Tamara 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 isn’t an online-advertising project. It’s a “free feature of Google Maps and Google Earth which enables users to virtually explore and navigate a neighbourhood through panoramic street-level images” and would I 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.”

Stay tuned for Part II showing not-blurry images in the cities most recently added to Google Sneak View.

(Cheers, Marc)

Jon Newton – p2pnet

Also see – Google Sneak Views: p2pnet, Part II

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Digital Homes – Google adds nine more Canadian Cities to Street View, December 3, 2009
CBC – Google Canada vows to purge faces from its Street View data, June 17, 2009
Globe & Mail – “The article you are looking for is available to GlobePlus members or can be licensed.”
cruised my town – Google SnoopMobile invades p2pnet turf, June 16, 2009

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Advertising, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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