Controversial Google camera cars spotted here (updated)

They're so controversial that, last week, the villagers of Broughton, England formed a human chain to stop a Google camera car from taking pictures of their houses.

Canada's privacy commissioner is looking into the possibility that Google's camera-equipped vehicles are violating Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

But this weekend, a fleet of Google Street View camera cars passed through Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario without even a whisper of reported protest.

"Hi Dave. Thought you might be interested in who was in Sault Ste. Marie Saturday morning," writes the faithful SooToday.com reader who snapped this photograph.

"I spotted six of these vehicles travelling together north on Great Northern Road," our reader reports.

"I followed them as far as the Searchmont highway. They continued north on 17. Only one of the cars had the Google logo on the door."

"I saw the same cars, Friday evening 6:15 or so, travelling east into the city on Wellington right beside the Mac's at the corner of Wellington and Pine," advises another reader, Carol Bumbacco.

"Only the first car had an identifying magnetic stick-on 'Google Maps.' And, only two of the cars had their photographic, tracking devices in a vertical position on top of their cars.

"The other two were collapsed, laid down on top of the car roofs. The interesting thing was, each driver had a computer in the front passenger seat, full screen. I could see it. Also, wireless headsets.

"The lead driver was talking when I stopped beside her on Wellington, at the corner of Pine. They were driving Chev Cobalts, darker blues," Bumbacco told us.

The street-level images, showing individual addresses, will eventually be posted on Google Maps.

Mashable, a popular news blog about social networking sites, has documented images of topless women sunbathing, men entering adult entertainment establishments and even apparent crimes-in-progress on Google Street View.

Click here to see what Mashable found

Google argues that it takes privacy concerns seriously.

"Street View only contains imagery from public roads, which is no different than what you might see driving down the street," the company says on its Google Maps website.

"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.

"Blurring technology and operational controls like image removal are among the ways in which we ensure that an individual's privacy is respected. 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."

To address privacy concerns, the company says it will use automated technology to blur faces that appear in Canadian Street View images.

Unlike the image taken by our reader, Google also intends to automatically blur licence plates here to protect the privacy of motorists.

Google announced late in March that it would be sending its controversial cars to film streetscapes in 11 Canadian cities: Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City, Saint John, Saskatoon, Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg.

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