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Google May Blur Canadian Faces and License Plates
KingK writes "Reuters reports that Google is considering a Canadian launch of its Street View map feature, which offers street-level close-ups of city centers. But the company said it would probably blur people's faces and vehicle license plates to respect tougher Canadian privacy laws."
Now I'm even more glad that I'm moving to Canada -- after seeing this story I looked up a bunch of stuff and apparently Canada has some of the best privacy laws in the world.
~The roAm
If they have the technology, why wouldn't they do the same across the board? It's not as though there's added value in seeing someone's face or license plate. The article doesn't mention anything about this.
Paranoia is not an acceptable answer. Google is capturing pieces of history that will last far longer than either your irrational embarrassment or your life.
This is no different from censoring YouTube videos for the King of Thailand. Superstitious peccadilloes and emotional censorship should only be respected where it's the law of the land. Period.
The Japanese blur their porn, and so someone has invented a device that removes it and restores the original image. This is possible because it performs a transformation from a limited set every time and so all you need is one clean sample.
If Google does the same you would need to find a photo that is probably of someone you have an image of once (or at worst a few times - hardly a problem when you consider the collaborative effort available) and the set up a un-blurring filter that would work with all their images.
These problems have all been solved - using a cryptographic RNG as a noise source for example - but they require more computing power and so it would be very tempting to save money by taking a short cut.
Beep beep.
Maybe Google should adapt their filter software so it blurs the face of anyone with a Canadian flag patched attached to themselves ;-)
Given the way that Google caved in to the Chinese demands, will they supply the CIA with a means of undoing this blurring? You would hope they would make it a one-way process, but that probably requires cryptography, hence computing power, hence money.
Google should find people who are willing for their faces to be used this way. Using the same face would be kind of disturbing, so a selection of faces would be needed, perhaps to roughly match the face that is being replaced (hair colour, race, sex, ...).
Think of the fun that we could have: a kind of Google powered Where's Wally .
There could even be a market for this: budding politicians, wannabe starlets who might pay to have their face become recognised or become familiar.
Depending on where you posted them, and what purpose posting them has, then yes, they would be illegal. I doubt very much that anybody in those pictures is going to make a complaint, but Canadian privacy laws say that you need written consent from everybody who appears in images that you publish. They also say that if you don't get written consent from anybody, then you can't publish them.
It's up to the person whose privacy has been violated to make a complaint and prosecute though.
The thing that separates your website from something like Google StreetView is that in Google's service, a whole lot more people are going to see the images, and there's a whole lot more images, so it's a whole lot more likely that somebody who didn't give consent is going to see their picture. Now most people probably wouldn't have any privacy concerns about it, but what if they publish an embarrassing picture like they've done on the US side? I think we've all seen some collection or another of pictures on Google's service where somebody's caught leering at a pretty girl, or going for a pee on the side of a highway, or walking in front of their window in the nude. All it takes is for one person caught in a compromising situation to notice their picture on Google's service and to make a complaint in order to shut down the service. Depending on how far they're willing to take their privacy complaint, it could actually shut Google out of Canada in its entirety.
It's called "cover your ass". And by blurring license plates and faces, Google can make a claim that the people they're photographing are anonymous. The laws in Canada are there to protect the people, which I know is a foreign concept to Americans lately, but it's one you guys should really consider reexamining.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Canada does indeed have pretty good privacy laws (when they are followed) but this isn't one of them.
... even if an individual gives consent, businesses must limit the collection, use and disclosure of personal data for uses that a reasonable person would consider appropriate under the circumstances ..."
Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is just plain wrong on this. Laughably wrong. Obviously wrong. 100%, "no-doubt-about-it" wrong.
As a Canadian, I am *embarrassed* that a company like Google is going to be forced to blur over everyones face or possibly even not extend coverage to Canada because of the wrong opinion of one middle-aged woman.
The operative part is this:
"Canada's privacy law prohibits the commercial use of personal data without permission from the individual
All perfectly reasonable right? Of course, but only when it comes to "personal information." The act envisions protecting things such as your bank accounts, your school and work records, and all those other things that any normal person refers to as "personal information." That's the intention of the law as written.
and here is Jennifer's mistake:
Stoddart says her office "... considers images of individuals that are sufficiently clear to allow an individual to be identified to be personal information within the meaning of [the act]."
This is exactly the same, as the whining we heard from nervous "sensitive" people in the US when street view was introduced there. Many intelligent people pointed out that there was no reason to obscure faces, license plates etc., because they weren't "your" information or "personal information." They were merely the result of what any public person standing on that spot could see at any given time and in fact, just the same as any holiday snap taken by any citizen.
Jennifer Stoddart is one of those "nervous" types of people with a strange idea of what "personal information" is. The intent of the privacy law in Canada was never that a shot of someone standing on a street corner is their "personal information" that's just Jennifer's interpretation, and that is the flaw in the argument. She is just wrong on her opinion that this is personal information.
For instance, if such images *were* personal information, then all street surveillance cameras would be illegal or unconstitutional by the same act (they are not in fact they are all over up here). One could argue that cameras in banks are illegal by the same measure. Certainly the cameras mounted in police cars, and the (very common up here) use of hand held cameras by police to monitor crowds also illegal.
There is nothing wrong with our privacy laws, it's just one person's mistaken interpretation of what constitutes "personal information" that is at fault here. Unfortunately, a lot of people will have to go through a lot of grief because of one STUPID person's "interpretation" of the law.