Alex Reid

For the past year, Google has been cataloging 360 views of several major cities in North America by literally driving around in a car with a mounted 360 camera. Canadian company Immersive Media has already recorded several major Canadian cities such as Winnipeg.

While most of the camera vehicles (here and there) use more subtle camera equipment this one, that was pulled over this morning by US Park Police in California, does not.

Due to concerns raised by Canada’s federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart about the program breaching Canada’s privacy laws last September, Google has stated it will blur faces and license plates for Canadian views when it gets rolled out – which has already led to lower resolution imagery.

“We won’t launch Street View in Canada the same as in the U.S.,” Google’s global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer said. “It means concretely that we’ll try to not have identifiable faces and identifiable licence plate numbers in any Street View images in Canada.”

Google is planning on rolling out some “network analysis tools” for people to see if their ISPs are purposely throttling their data connection.

“We’re trying to develop tools, software tools…that allow people to detect what’s happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they’re not happy with what they’re getting – that they think certain services are being tampered with,” Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco.

Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art, a coalition of artists, has created a brilliant web comic visually explaining the recent history of Canadian copyright reform. The PDF is under 3MB and contains nearly 200 hyper links to other documents.

It reminds me of a project Brian Barth was working on, ala Scott McCloud to explain City Hall.