Street View Presenting Serious Problems in Canada and Europe

Google's idea of Street View was looked upon with the utmost interest and was expected as a sort of a second coming, because it brought everything close, without an actual physical presence being required. Users could check if there was a line at the movies, from the comfort of their homes, or could search for a parking spot, without having to drive around the block a thousand times as it often happens.

Well, Europe seems to be rather uptight when it comes to things like this; and not because comfort isn't important, after all, we have the Ottoman Empire closer than the US and the furniture is a dream, but the privacy disputes are wearing us down. We've been having them from as early as the Middle Ages, when the first peasant covered his windows with planks of wood and said that he had invented draperies, and his landlord then realized that his free porn channel was on pay-per-view only and he sued for the right of prima nocte just to get even.

Google is forced, in order to avoid this whole charade of "I sue you for you see me", to blur the faces of people on the streets and the license plates of all the cars preemptively, or otherwise remove personal identifiable images before being published. Canada is following the footsteps of Europe on this matter, so it's not going to be as smooth-a-sailing for Google as it had hoped, based on the hype that surrounded the launch of the Street View feature.

And as bad news never come alone, the Mountain View based company is currently considering "anonymizing" the content in the US as well, so if everything goes as planned, you'll probably be seeing a lot of blur in the images on which you counted to give you a feel of the street in the morning or whenever. If you're lucky, they'll consider filling in the blurred faces with emoticons in accordance with the respective person's mood, but I doubt it.