Google's Street View is now live in Canada.
(Credit: Google)Google announced on Wednesday that it has launched its Street View service to 11 cities in Canada, including Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, among others.
Google Street View, which originally launched in May 2007, allows users to virtually navigate neighborhoods in 14 countries around the world. When the service first launched, it was only available in five U.S. cities.
Street View has come under some fire since its debut for the service's alleged potential to infringe the privacy of those people found in its images. To address that issue in Canada, Google said in a statement that it "has gone to great lengths to ensure Canadians' privacy."
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 ensure no one in the images could be identified. As with its other Street View services, Google's Canadian Street View features a "Report a problem" link, allowing concerned users to request images be taken down.
Whether Google would ever be able to bring Street View to Canada was very much up in the air not too long ago. In September 2007, Canada's Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart wrote to Google saying that she was concerned that the service might violate her country's privacy regulations. She believed that Street View could infringe Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which went into effect on January 1, 2004.
For its part, Google said in the statement on Wednesday that it "consulted with Canada's federal and provincial Privacy Commissioners in developing Street View and its privacy safeguards." Evidently, that has helped the company bring Street View to the country.
Few could imagine a more chilling tale of depravity than the story that has emerged over the last few days concerning the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard.
While her alleged kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, has now been revealed to have penned a disturbing blog, some commenters on Boing Boing have uncovered visuals from Google Street View that they believe show him in pursuit of a Google car.
Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin has posted a series of Street View shots in which a van is seen progressing from Garrido's address in Antioch, Calif., toward a Street View car.
At Boing Boing, Jardin gives precise directions on how to follow the van on Street View and believes that its driver may have been suspicious of a Google Volkswagen that was filming for the Street View site. Jardin describes it as "the creepiest thing I've ever seen on Google Street View."
No one viewing this footage when it first went live would ever have considered it suspicious. However, some have pointed out that had police viewed this overhead shot from Google Maps, perhaps it might have made them search Garrido's home with a little more vigor.
The Free Music Archive, an organization created by WFMU, a "freeform" radio station, has officially launched into beta. So far, the site has 5,000 tracks that users can download for free. According to the site's founders, the Free Music Archive is aimed at becoming a repository of tracks, remixes, and music clips for personal consumption. Any of the songs can be added to podcasts, video shows, or a playlist. No licensing fees or royalties will be charged. The organization hopes that through free downloads, more people will buy an artist's full album. Along with a download link, each individual track page has a link to the artist's album page. That page makes the full album available for purchase. The Free Music Archive is live now.
Insurance company Geico has launched a new site to provide visitors with all the information they need about Geico-sponsored car racing teams. Dubbed GeicoGarage, the new site provides access to the company's NASCAR program. It features updated news and photos on all the teams, as well as bios, competition schedules, and downloads.
Enterprise collaboration service Socialtext recently announced that it has raised $4.5 million in a new round of financing that was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Omidyar Networks. The company's founder said in a blog post that he plans to use the funding to improve the product.
Social-banking firm SmartyPig announced Thursday that it has launched a new mobile site. The site will allow users to quickly access account information, as well as view the status of their financial goals. They can also track transaction history and transfer funds from their mobile device. The mobile site is optimized for the iPhone, but the company says that users on Android-based devices will be able to see the site just fine. The SmartyPig mobile site is live now.
A man who didn't want to be photographed for Google Street View turned the tables on the online giant and threatened to take a picture of the Street View vehicle and its driver unless it moved on, the Telegraph is reporting. It didn't, so he started snapping pictures. The driver in the Google vehicle became upset that the photographer was taking pictures of him and shouted to the man to stop taking pictures of him. He then asked for his face to be blurred. Individual faces are also blurred in Google StreetView images.
There are any number of amusements to be found on Google Maps, candid images of the world captured by Google's car-mounted cameras, but I couldn't resist passing this one along.
It looks as if southbound on Merchant Street in Pittsburgh, Pa., is a lousy spot to have a camera mounted on a stalk on the roof of your car.
Open the link above and click the forward arrows. You can watch as the car heads toward the low-clearance bridge, then see the view go askew, then see it corrected again, apparently because the camera was remounted correctly.
Or you can watch the drama unfold in the screenshots below.
Google Sightseeing, which collects entertaining Street View moments, also found this case of a Street View car getting stuck in the mud in Australia.
(Via Paul Buchheit.)
Here comes the bridge.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Whack. The camera no longer points forward.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Now the camera flopped backward to show to the car's rear window.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Whew! The camera is restored to its rightful position.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)This story has been updated. See below for details.
Watchdog group Privacy International has filed a formal complaint with the U.K. government over the recent introduction of Google's Street View in Britain.
Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, argues that Street View has caused "clear embarrassment and damage" to many residents of the U.K., according to a BBC News report. The street-level feature of Google Maps, which debuted in the U.K. last week, provides a driver's-eye photographic record of urban landscapes, including storefronts and pedestrians.
The complaint was filed with the Information Commissioner's Office, which confirmed that the documents had been received, but declined to provide any details. Privacy International did not immediately respond to inquiries.
Street View should be "switched off" while the U.K. government investigates the matter, Davies said, according to the BBC. Privacy International is said to cite 200-plus reports of Street View making members of the public identifiable.
The Information Commissioner's Office worked with Google before Street View was launched in the U.K. and said that the Internet giant offered assurances that adequate safeguards would be put into place. In a statement provided Tuesday, the ICO said:
It is Google's responsibility to ensure all vehicle registration marks and faces are satisfactorily blurred. Individuals who feel that an image does identify them (and are unhappy with this) should contact Google direct to get the image removed. Individuals who have raised concerns with Google about their image being included - and who do not think they have received a satisfactory response - can complain to the ICO.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the BBC that the company agrees with privacy concerns. "The way we address it is by allowing people to opt out, literally to take anything we capture that is inappropriate out," he said in the BBC story, "and we do it as quickly as we possibly can."
In February, Google won a lawsuit in a U.S. court over a complaint by a Pittsburgh couple that Street View had violated their privacy.
Update 7:28 a.m. PDT: Privacy International has provided a copy of its filing with the ICO. The gist:
In summary, we believe on the basis of complaints received, that the service has created numerous instances of embarrassment and distress and that the promised privacy safeguards do not provide adequate protection to shield Street View from the general requirement to provide notice prior to collection of the data. We also believe that the technology has created substantial threat to a number of individuals and that the extent of intrusion into the homes of some complainants is unlawful. In such cases, Google should have acquired consent from individuals before images were captured.
Among the complaints cited by Privacy International:
• A woman who has for several years been moving house to avoid detection from a former violent partner complained to us that she felt extreme distress when Street View identified her outside her new home.• Two men working for a large organization were identified by work colleagues in a situation which gave the appearance that they were kissing each other. This was not the case, but the image - subsequently widely circulated throughout the organization - has caused great humiliation to them and their (female) partners.
• A fifteen year-old boy was caught on Street View carrying a skateboard, which his parents had expressly forbade him from using. The boy subsequently had a row with the parents and is now staying with friends.
Google Maps now shows Trafalgar Square in London among other locations.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google has brought its driver's-eye view of the world to more parts of Europe, releasing Street View imagery for the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
As with the United States and other countries that have Street View, not all areas are photographed, but major cities have some coverage. Google Blogoscoped had this list of cities: Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Coventry, Derby, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Scunthorpe, Sheffield, Southampton, and York in England; Belfast in Northern Ireland; Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland; and Cardiff and Swansea in Wales.
For the virtual tourist, Google Maps Mania has a nice gallery of images, too.
Google's Street View now is augmented by photos supplied by contributors to the company's Panoramio service. This shot of the St. Louis courthouse is more scenic than the official Street View version. Note also the advertisement below the photo. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google Maps' Street View feature uses imagery collected by cameras mounted to Google cars, but now the company is blending in photos taken by the public as well.
Panoramio, which Google acquired in 2007, lets people share photos that have been geotagged with location data so they can be shown on a map. Those Panoramio photos already were available in Google Earth and Google Maps, but now they can show on the more personal Street View as well, Google programmer Frederik Schaffalitzky said in a blog post Wednesday.
Potential advantages of checking the photos on Street View include views at a higher resolution view or during a different time of day, which could be handy for the occasions when Google's Street View camera was shooting into the sun and didn't produce much of an image.
And of course a disadvantage is that the Street View intrusiveness to which some people object is amplified.
When a view can be shown with Panoramio images, a "user photos" icon shows in the upper-right corner of Street View. Clicking it shows an array of local photo thumbnails, and clicking one of those thumbnails loads that image. Above it is a link to the Panoramio page of the person who added the photo.
Not every Panoramio image is included. Once you've contributed geotagged photos to Panoramio, "Google's image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location," Schaffalitzky said.
Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)Citing privacy concerns, a group of Japanese lawyers and professors have asked Google to shut down its Street View feature of Google Maps in the country, according to a Reuters report.
"We strongly suspect that what Google has been doing deeply violates a basic right that humans have," said Yasuhiko Tajima, a professor of constitutional law at Sophia University in Tokyo and head of the Campaign Against Surveillance Society, in an interview with Reuters.
"It is necessary to warn society that an IT (information technology) giant is openly violating privacy rights, which are important rights that the citizens have, through this service," he said.
Google didn't immediately comment on its plans for Japan but directed attention to its Street View privacy site, which says the service respects people's privacy.
"Street View only features photographs taken on public property and the imagery is no different from what a person can readily see or capture walking down the street. Imagery of this kind is available in a wide variety of formats for cities all around the world. We are committed to respecting local laws and norms in each country in which we launch Street View," the page says. "We make it easy for users to ask to have photographs of themselves, their children, their cars or their houses completely removed from the product, even where the images have already been blurred."
Google Maps Street View doubled its coverage of the United States Tuesday.
(Credit: Google)Street View is continuing its seemingly inexorable spread across Google Maps, with Google announcing that it's doubled the feature's coverage of the United States.
The states that now have some coverage are Maine, West Virginia, North Dakota, and South Dakota, Google said Tuesday. Cities now covered include Memphis, Tenn., Charleston, S.C., and Birmingham, Ala., and Google filled in many gaps between cities as well; Google spotlighted the Devil's Tower in Wyoming on its Lat-Long blog announcement.
Upon seeing the updated Street View coverage maps posted Tuesday on Google's blog, one co-worker quipped, "It's like a zombie infection!"
Street View, like the satellite views of Google Maps before it, initially raised hackles that Google's all-seeing electronic eye was eroding privacy, even though taking photos from public streets is legal. But it appears to me the ruckus is dying down. Am I right about that? Chime in with comments if you see things differently.
Google also has expanded internationally this year, with Street View scenery now available in France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Spain, and New Zealand.
Google on Wednesday night released the new version 0.4.154.31 of its Chrome browser to bash a bug that bit me by blackening the new big-screen version of Street View.
Indeed, I no longer get the problem. Now if the company could get its Google Earth browser plug-in to work with Chrome, it would look more like Google's right hand is cooperating with its left hand.
According to Chrome Program Manager Mark Larson, the new version also fixes "trackpad scrolling on more laptops (and the) Sogou Pinyin Chinese input method editor skipping the first letter typed." Fuller details are posted on the release notes page.
Chrome is in beta test form, but the new version, 0.4.154.31, is a developer release that's another notch more raw. For example, it includes attempted and "speculative" fixes that are more experiments to stop some crashes than proven solutions.
By virtue of Chrome's phone-home feature, Google can track crash reports, and one bug developers are trying to fix is among the top 10 causes of crashes.
To activate the crash-reporting tool, which isn't enabled by default, click the wrench icon to open the Tools menu, click "Options," click the "Under the Hood" tab, then check the "Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google" box. And if you're concerned that the Googlebot is monitoring your every keystroke, here's Google's description of the Chrome reporting tool's activity:
Information that's sent to Google includes crash reports and statistics on how often you use Google Chrome features. When you choose to accept a suggested query or URL in the address bar, the text you typed and the corresponding suggestion is sent to Google. Google Chrome doesn't send other personal information, such as name, e-mail address, or Google Account information.
Chrome, by default, already sends to Google the Web addresses you type so the browser can suggest search terms or auto-complete addresses. Turning on the monitoring feature means that it also keeps track of which of those suggestions you like.
