A Canadian Virtual Street View Service Launched in BC

The federal and the Ontario Privacy Commissioners have raised possible concerns about privacy issues that may emerge from the advent of a new street-view service, featuring high-resolution photos of main streets and residential areas in British Columbia. Described as being similar to Google's Street View launched in 2007, the Canpages' Street View service is said to give viewers the sensation of walking city streets using 360-degree, high-resolution images taken by a special camera. A Canpages user can look up a business address, see its location in Google Maps, and then proceed to sample a street view of the location. To date, the service has been restricted to a few streets in Vancouver, Whistler and Squamish BC, but the company said it plans to extend the service across Canada in the coming months. Although Google's competing street view service has been launched in both the US and the UK, it has not yet been launched in Canada. As Canpages has done, Google has said that in Canada it will blur face images and licence plate identification. A remaining question that has interested privacy advocates and government officials is whether the original images, before they are blurred, will be retained or whether it is only the blurred images that will be kept by the service provider. For news reports, visit: http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/Home/News.asp?id=52428; and http://tinyurl.com/czcyc3 Summary by: The Editor