January 31, 2011...As it stands we are on the right side of...

January 31, 2011

...As it stands we are on the right side of prevailing privacy laws in Australia for example although we pride ourselves on the clarity of our imagery you can't make out peoples faces or identifiable features. Usually we capture urban areas at 7.5cm which pretty much guarantees anonymity. Only in unusual circumstances would we capture at a higher resolution for example our recent survey of the floods in Brisbane was @2.5cm driven primarily by the prevailing cloud i.e. we had to fly under it and the lower you fly the higher the resolution. (I know there is a more technical explanation and I will leave that to my CTO Simon Cope on his blog).

Now that we are also collecting user data for email marketing and the like protecting individuals privacy and being responsible with personal information is something we take seriously and the trust that goes with it. I feel comfortable with how we are thinking about our responsibilities and the processes we are putting in place however that is not to say things can't go wrong. If they do we will be upfront and communicate quickly with our users. I think it boils down to the trust we can build with our users and customers over time - we need to work hard every day communicating with them and building our brand and personality. I never want us to be a faceless organisation and we will experiment with how we can inject humour and quirkiness into what we do and how we communicate so that people who use nearmap.com know they are dealing with real people who take the responsibility of managing their personal details seriously.

http://nearmapceo.posterous.com/