As It Happens on CBC Radio just played a good double segment on “Google Eyes”. The first part looked at the Amazon Mechanical Turk task looking for Steve Fossett’s plane on satellite images. The second part looked at privacy issues around street level imaging from outfits like Google.
Mechanical Turk (Artificial Artificial Intelligence) is a project where people can contribute to tasks that need many human eyes like looking at thousands of satellite images for a missing plane. It reminds me of the SETI@home project which lets users install a screen saver that uses your unused processing cycles for SETI signal processing. SETI@home is not part of a generalized project, BOINC that, like the Mechanical Turk, has a process for people to post tasks for others to work on.
The Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced yesterday that she has written both Google and Immersive Media (who developed the Street View technology used by Google) “to seek further information and assurances that Canadians’ privacy rights will be safeguarded if their technology is deployed in Canada.” The issue is that,
While satellite photos, online maps and street level photography have found useful commercial and consumer applications, it remains important that individual privacy rights are considered and respected during the development and implementation of these new technologies.
This is a growing concern among privacy advocates as a number of companies have considered integrating street level photography in their online mapping technologies.
In street level photography the images are, in some cases, being captured using high-resolution video cameras affixed to vehicles as they proceed along city streets.
Google, according to the commission on the radio, has not replied to the August 9th letter.