Information & Ethics Committee on June 17th, 2009

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Order.

This is the 29th meeting of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. Our order today, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), is a study of the privacy implications of camera surveillance.

Our witnesses today are from Google Inc. and from Canpages. From Google Inc., we have with us Mr. Jonathan Lister, managing director and head of Google Canada. From Canpages Inc., we have with us Mr. Olivier Vincent, president and chief executive officer.

Good afternoon, gentlemen. We welcome you to the committee's consideration.

The committee passed a motion to the effect that the committee study the privacy implications of camera surveillance, such as Google Street View and Canpages, and other issues related to video surveillance and that the committee ask Google and its representative and Canpages and its representative to testify before the committee on this subject.

We thank you for appearing. We understand you both have some brief opening remarks or demos for the committee. We'd like to proceed. Who is going to go first?

Mr. Lister, please proceed.

[Jonathan Lister, Managing Director and Head of Google Canada, Google Inc.]

Thank you.

Thanks for having me, and thanks for having Google here.

Members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, my name is Jonathan Lister, and I am the managing director and head of Google Canada. It is my pleasure to be here today to provide you with more information about Street View, the innovative way to view street-level geographic imagery in Google Maps.

I believe I can say without hubris that most of you will be familiar with Google. Google is best known for its highly popular search engine. Millions of Canadians use Google every day to search the Internet.

Innovation, vision, and commitment to our corporate mission--taking the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful--power the Google search engine. These are the same attributes that have led to the development of Street View, which we are here to discuss today.

Google is committed to innovation in Canada and around the world. On a global basis, Google invests billions of dollars in research and development. In 2008 we spent over $2.5 billion on R and D. We are committed to growing our capacity for innovation by creating highly skilled, knowledge-based jobs right here in Canada. We've established offices in Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa, and Montreal. Google has world-leading engineers working in Canada helping to create the next breakthrough technologies, not just for Canada but with global impact.

I'm pleased to tell you that the Great Place to Work Institute named Google Canada the best place to work in Canada, beating out other well-known corporate icons. We also just won the 2009 annual Marketing/Leger corporate reputation survey, which we are deeply proud of.

Google is actively engaged in the Canadian business community and within the broader society as a whole. We've partnered with a company in Halifax called Eco-Nova to help create the technology for Google Earth's ocean feature in order to look at shipwrecks. We have worked with the David Suzuki Foundation to develop ways Google can be used to improve education on environmental issues. Our Canadian staff participate in regular community service projects such as whole-day staff retreats to work on a farm to help provide food for those less fortunate.

We are proud of the work we do in Canada, and we take our corporate responsibilities very seriously.

Street View's success and popularity should not come as a surprise. Many of us find it difficult to read maps and follow directions. Many of us understand geographical information visually. With Street View, which is a feature in Google Maps, users get the best of both worlds: they get a traditional map, plus they get street-level pictures to help them identify key landmarks. It's this innovation that makes the product really useful and popular.

The U.K. launch of Street View on March 19, 2009, was so successful that visits, according to Hitwise, to Google Maps U.K. increased by 41%. I'm confident Street View will have an equally positive response from Canadians. In fact, we know that Canadians are eager for this product. In the last six months alone, Canadians have viewed over 100 million panoramas of other countries. Once images of their own country are available, we are sure their enthusiasm for this product will only grow.

I agree with Mr. Poilievre's assessment in his National Post op-ed piece when he wrote:

...the presence of Google's Street View in Canadian cities is great news. It will showcase our urban life and attract tourists. It will allow parents to preview potential living conditions, as their kids leave the nest and go off to university. It will bring us in line with American, European and Asian cities that have hosted this service.

We are confident that individual Canadians and businesses, especially the tourism and real estate sectors, will see the benefits of this highly popular product. Individuals will also be able to use Street View to explore their city.

In early 2008 we linked Street View images with driving directions, giving users the ability to virtually see and familiarize themselves with their route before setting off. They can print out their driving directions with photos. For example, in Calgary, Macleod Trail is a major traffic artery at the heart of the city, albeit with too few stoplights and turnoffs. With Street View, people who aren't familiar with the highway can map out their exit and help avoid the fender benders that are all too common.

Street View also has enormous tourism and place-based marketing potential. For example, in 2008 we partnered with the organizers of the Tour de France to provide fans with a rider's eye view of the course. We could do the same with tourist events in Canada, such as marathons in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Imagine showcasing Vancouver 2010 to people around the world.

In these difficult and challenging economic times, Canadian tourism and hospitality industries are struggling to cope with changing travel and tourism behaviours. An innovative service like Street View has the potential to change the way these industries market themselves and attract new visitors.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the possible economic benefits to come from a product like Street View. Another use, which we can discuss further if there's interest, is in the hard-hit real estate sector.

Clearly, Street View is a product that is changing the way people think about maps. In many facets of our daily lives the Internet is changing how we perform tasks, from banking, to planning vacations, to researching programs for our children. While changes can create initial unease, we believe they will over the long term benefit millions. The changes in digital cartography are no different. Millions will benefit from the addition of street-level photography to the maps found on the Internet.

Mapping helps us better understand and navigate the world around us. Mapping data is an integral part of the world's information that Google is innovating around to make universally accessible and useful. Furthermore, since the earliest days of photography, cartographers have taken and published street-level imagery to help map our urban landscapes. The great innovation of Google Street View is the ability to marry street-level images with digital maps in order to provide a superior product for Internet users.

I recognize this committee has questions about the privacy implications of this product. Let me assure you that the Google innovation that has driven the development of this product is the same innovation we put into building Street View's world-leading privacy protections.

First and foremost, Google is respectful of the laws of each country in which Street View operates. The imagery we make available shows no more than what any of you would see while travelling down a public street. The images in Street View are a snapshot in time, often several months to a year old. They aren't real time. While we only collect images from public places, we've always recognized that some passers-by may be inadvertently included in our pictures. As such, Google has invested significant resources into the development of a world-leading process for identifying and blurring certain features in an image, namely, identifiable faces and licence plates. We've invested a huge amount of engineering talent into the development of this automated identification and blurring technology, which is applied before images are published. Make no mistake about it, facial and licence plate identification and blurring—especially at the scale Google operates—is a significant feat of engineering innovation.

Another key component to the privacy protections built into Street View is the easy-to-use, take-down request system. Every published Street View image includes a “report a problem” link, which takes users to a simple removals page. Any individual can ask to have an image entirely removed from the publication if it features themselves, their family, their car, or their home. This removal applies even if aspects of the image have already been blurred. We process removal requests every day in multiple languages and offer a fast and efficient turnaround time for each request.

Another important aspect of our efforts to ensure privacy protection is our commitment to work with key stakeholders in every country in order to identify and contact relevant local organizations prior to launch. Our team will work to reach out to Canadian stakeholders and provide them with all the relevant details of Street View, including how to have their organization's image removed or blurred from the site.

We're also putting in place a system that will ensure that on launch day for Street View in Canada, we will have additional staff on hand to handle take-down requests.

Let me close by saying that as with many cutting-edge technologies, the challenge we face with Street View is striking the right balance between building a sophisticated and highly useful tool and ensuring that the data we collect to provide these services is used appropriately.

The many people across the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere who already use Street View to explore their communities, tourist attractions, or cities on the other side of the world tell us that we've created a great, useful product, one that builds privacy protections into the very design of the product.

With the addition of Canadian cities in the near future, we look forward to expanding these benefits to many more Google Maps users in the months to come.

Street View is a highly innovative advancement in digital cartography. It has won over fans in every country where it has been launched. We have incorporated world-leading privacy protections into Street View, and we continue to work with all relevant stakeholders to improve these protections.

Innovation drives everything we do at Google, both around the world and here in Canada. We are very excited to be able to one day soon share Street View, the latest wellspring of Google innovation, with all Canadians.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lister.

Mr. Vincent.

[Olivier Vincent, President and Chief Executive Officer, Canpages Inc.]

Good afternoon.

My name is Olivier Vincent and I'm the president and CEO of Canpages Inc.

Canpages is a local search and directory publisher that operates mostly in Canada. We provide a multimedia platform that focuses on relevant local results. We offer these platforms to users in print, online, and mobile platforms. We have in excess of 3.5 million unique visitors in Canada, who come to our website every month with their own local search requests.

In 2008 we were very proud to be recognized as the fastest-growing online company in Canada. Rich and relevant local content, such as photos, videos, and other immersive media, sets Canpages.ca apart from other directories and local search firms. Our robust online directory combines comprehensive data and a unique user experience with maps and satellite images provided by several partners, including Google.

With more than 80 print publications across Ontario, B.C., Quebec, Alberta, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories, and 80,000 customers a year, we reach more than eight million households and businesses across Canada. We have tripled our employee base from 200 to more than 650 employees in the last two years.

We also offer advanced mobile search technologies and multiple search possibilities, with free text messages to mobile phones, mobile maps, direct SMS search and advanced WAP, and BlackBerry and iPhone mobile application experiences.

In March 2009, as part of our ongoing commitment to innovation and to delivering the best search experience possible to customers, Canpages launched Street Scene, its own version of panoramic street photos, initially focusing on the Vancouver 2010 Olympic cities of Vancouver, Squamish, and Whistler.

Fully integrated with Canpages' local search functionality, Street Scene provides panoramic street-level views of the city, so users can not only pinpoint their search results on a map, but also see high-resolution visuals of their search results in the context of the local environment. For example, users can take a virtual walk down the city streets to a local restaurant or hotel. They can see how it looks from the outside before they make a reservation, or they can assess whether there is street parking or some other parking lot nearby.

We are focusing on commercial areas. You will not see a focus on residential areas with Canpages.

The Street Scene service has been very well received by consumers and tourists alike. We have received millions of visits since the launch of Street Scene in March of this year, and we have not received a single complaint to date. As a matter of fact, we have received overwhelming feedback from visitors, advertisers, and businesses alike.

At the same time, Canpages considers respect of privacy as a key priority and is sensitive to the privacy concerns that might be raised by individuals who are photographed during the preparation of the data required by the Street Scene service. Canpages is committed to bringing every individual the assurance that it will respect their privacy, and has publicly stated its privacy policy regarding its Street Scene service.

We will notify the public before we start shooting. Individual faces and other recognizable features like licence plates are blurred on the captured image prior to being posted online. The blurring process uses a proprietary technology that is irreversible by the users. All original non-blurred files are destroyed after blurring and before being posted online. There is no way to get back these original files later on.

Users can report any concern at any time using the “report a concern” feedback located on every image. Upon a specific request, Canpages will provide extra blurring for an entire person, a vehicle, a window, a building, a pet--you name it. While privacy laws are not necessarily reflective of the rapidly growing field of technology, we at Canpages want to take a proactive approach to all concerns that may be raised.

Street Scene is an extremely innovative product and a testament to great progress for online local searches. We believe it will benefit consumers and businesses and encourage tourism in Canada.

Canpages has engaged with the public, the privacy commissioners of Canada, and Mr. Pierre Poilievre, the MP who filed a motion before this committee to review privacy matters.

In conclusion, Canpages is committed to working both immediately and as part of an ongoing process to address potential privacy issues that might arise as a result of its continuous innovation in the field of local search.

Also, if you don't mind, I'd like to give you a two-minute run-through of the system so you can actually see it working live, with Canadian data. If you can direct yourself to the screen, you will see that I've made a search for restaurants in Vancouver. While I'm finding a lot of results, I've pre-selected some of the ones that I'm interested in and that will appear.

The first one is an Indian restaurant. I'm going to click on Street Scene and I'm going to see it. Canpages takes me directly to a visual of that restaurant. I can even move around and have a look at the surroundings. I can go to full screen to have a better view of it. As you can see, I can even walk around, and all these little dots on the ground represent the location of a panoramic view. At every position, you can have a detailed look at the surroundings.

Next I'm looking at an interesting furniture store in Vancouver. You can see that people's faces are blurred. There's no way to recognize them.

This way, I can tour all around the Vancouver, Whistler, and Squamish area. Not only that, but we can also open the doors of these restaurants and all these businesses. Now I'm opening a virtual door into a business and I'm walking in. I'm now able to have a look at and visit that restaurant. We're doing this for every business out there, such as beauty salons, retail stores, etc., to give you a chance to have a total immersive experience, with that whole chain and experience of Street Scene as a particularly important component of it.

We'll now go to Whistler. These images were taken right before winter so there is no snow on the mountain, but I'm even in the walking area of Whistler here. I can go up and down the whole city of Whistler. We have the Sea to Sky Highway available, as well as all the nice and appealing areas of Canada.

These beautiful areas are on Street Scene. I hope that gives you an idea of how this can work and how powerful that is in the context of a local search.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Thanks to both of you for a very interesting presentation. I think the commercial side is well understood. The privacy issues are probably the area of most interest.

Just as an example, we understand that in Greece, Japan, Germany, the U.K., the U.S., and Australia, and now in Canada, privacy concerns have been raised with the jurisdictional authorities. It is an interesting question about whether or not services such as Street View or Canpages make the connection with the privacy jurisdictions, whether it is, in Canada, the federal Privacy Commissioner or the three provinces that have their own personal privacy acts, and whether those privacy concerns were dealt with in advance of commencing the taking of images across the country.

As a starting point, I wonder if both of you could address the way that you conduct your business vis-à-vis privacy concerns.

[Jonathan Lister]

Google takes privacy concerns extremely seriously. Our commitment is to work with the Privacy Commissioner and to meet all local, federal, and provincial laws around privacy prior to launching a product. We're working with the Privacy Commissioner and have been for some time. We are participating in this venue to answer questions.

We've put world-leading privacy protections into the product. I think some of these protections are not readily available on other like products. Like many organizations, we try to balance out our innovation and deriving economic benefit with concern for privacy and creating privacy protections. Google feels it has struck a strong balance and is doing everything it can to meet its privacy obligations.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Mr. Vincent.

[Olivier Vincent]

Very similarly to our friends at Google, for Canpages privacy is priority number one in these surveys. For a month now, I've been communicating actively with all the privacy commissioners of Canada, on both the federal and provincial levels. We've had quite a lot of exchange of communication with them, and answered all the questions they've had so far.

Actually I was presenting this morning at the GIAC leaders forum here in Ottawa, and the assistant privacy commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, was presenting with me at the time. We had a very good debate in front of a number of industry people around our particular rules.

On top of that, we've studied the law very carefully to make sure that we would not do anything wrong, and I must say that at this stage we find the law pretty efficient and pretty good in describing what can be done and can't be done. And we have really found our interaction with the privacy commissioners very efficient. We find everybody reasonable and willing to understand that yes, indeed, new technologies are opening new fields and may create concern, but at the same time you don't want to hamper technology with excessive requirements.

I think we struck a balance, and the feedback we've had so far from all the privacy commissioners is that we're doing the right thing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Thank you.

Mrs. Simson, please.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Lister and Mr. Vincent, for appearing before the committee, because there are several concerns I have after speaking with my constituents and other colleagues.

Mr. Vincent, to your credit, Canpages gave me a little bit of assurance in your presentation. So I'm going to address this question to Mr. Lister.

Google identifies and blurs the faces and the licence plates in Street View. But the concern was always the secure storage of the unblurred version of the pictures. So notwithstanding any assurances that we get about the safe storage, I guess my question is why is there a need to retain the unblurred version in any event? This was the concern raised by our Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, and I think it's a valid question.

I do like the Canpages presentation where the unblurred version is destroyed prior to it even being posted. So why wouldn't Google be doing the same thing?

[Jonathan Lister]

The best way for me to answer is just to step back for a moment and maybe set the context that Google is a company that is driven by innovation; we're constantly innovating and constantly creating new product. We think that has great economic benefit and great benefit to consumers, and we think this has been proven on a number of occasions.

That being said, the reason that Google retains non-blurred images at all is for product enhancement. So in order to make the product better, Google software engineers keep the photos around for a period of time during which they do improvements on the product and for a number of other reasons. I can describe one product improvement or product enhancement. The product operates at immense scale. So Google is taking, as you can imagine, millions of photos, and there are people who are inadvertently and incidentally captured. Google blurs these images at an incredible scale, and although our software is very good, it is not always perfect, and it occasionally generates a false positive. So occasionally the software will mistake a round sign for somebody's face. For the purposes of trying to improve the software, we keep the images around.

However, Google recently has made a revision to its data retention policy and has decided that it needs to keep the images around for an adequate but non-excessive period of time, after which those non-blurred images will be permanently blurred and therefore rendered anonymous.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

There must be other uses, though. I understand what you're saying about technology, but why would it be necessary to retain all of this? Surely there must be other reasons you're retaining it. If you can elaborate on that, I'd really appreciate it.

[Jonathan Lister]

Sure. I think the important issue is that we have revised the retention policy, such that we will be blurring these non-blurred images. So we will not be retaining any non-blurred images.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

You're destroying them. Is that what you're saying?

[Jonathan Lister]

We will be blurring them.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

How do you permanently blur them? Why not just do what Canpages does and blur and destroy the original image? You certainly don't have to keep every image just to upgrade the technology. So destroy it before you upload it for the public to see.

[Jonathan Lister]

The scale at which Google operates makes it very difficult for anybody, particularly me or someone else who is not a leader of technology in the organization, to describe the moment in time or the right amount to keep. So rather than make a commitment it can't keep, Google has made a decision to blur those non-blurred images after this adequate but not excessive period of time.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

That could be why, and that brings me to my next question.

Both Mr. Vincent and you have stated that you respect the privacy laws in the individual countries. As a Canadian, my concern is that our privacy law is over 25 years old, is virtually untouched, and has not kept pace with technology—not even close. I think that's where the fear is coming from. Obviously, those fears are shared around the world. To the chair's point, Greece, Japan, and Germany weren't all ecstatic about this. That's especially so when you hear about people who don't want this surrounding a town or street. It could be based on the fact that there is inadequate protection under the individual countries' laws.

I'd like to know how you think that could be best addressed to allay their fears.

[Jonathan Lister]

If I could take a part of that question for one moment to put everyone's mind at ease so that we don't paint pictures that aren't entirely accurate, I think there are also plenty of stories where towns have welcomed the arrival of products like Street View. There are towns that have indicated they'd be very willing—certainly for commercial reasons—to have the arrival of Street View. So there are lots of great stories, as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Thi Lac, please.

[Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Good afternoon, Mr. Lister and Mr. Vincent.

First of all, you shoot mainly in industrial and business areas. Do you also shoot in residential areas?

[Olivier Vincent]

If you don't mind, I will answer first. Canpages Inc. really concentrates on commercial streets, because we want to bring together users and businesses. We are not interested in residential areas.

However, it does happen sometimes that people also live on commercial streets. So, it is possible that some images will be collected that include private components. I do not mean to say that this can never happen but, as a general rule, we stay in business areas.

[Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

You also say that Canpages is committed to informing the public before it starts shooting. How do you make contact with the public?

[Olivier Vincent]

That is a good question. In fact, it is not easy. Ideally, we should be advertising everywhere, on a daily basis, for months on end. However, that is not reasonable, nor is it physically feasible. Our plan provides for advertising in local print media and on the Internet to a great extent, where a lot of people are surfing. We think that is adequate, not only to be absolutely certain that we are abiding by the legislation, but also—and this is even more important—to be in a position to inform people and tell them that a Canpages vehicle may be driving down their street to take pictures.

I would like to digress for one moment just to reinforce what Jonathan said a moment ago. I myself have been in one of those vehicles a number of times. You cannot imagine the expressions of enthusiasm from people in the street for this type of service. People follow us and gesture to us. They are prepared to do absolutely anything to be photographed. When we stop at a red light, the windows come down and people ask us if we are from Google. We explain that we are not. However, the vast majority of people are delighted and try to find a way to be photographed. In actual fact, that causes problems for us because, once again, we are not interested in people; we are only interested in businesses.

[Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

You talked about blurring pictures of licence plates and faces, but you did not say anything about civic numbers that might appear that are not associated with businesses. Is there a process whereby you can also blur the civic numbers of private homes or residences that might end up in your videos?