Google alerts Canadians about Street View filming

People strolling past homes, stores and even strip joints across Canada will soon be captured and frozen in time by Google's camera, to appear in high-resolution street-level images on the internet.

Google will be driving around 11 Canadian cities across the country again "in coming weeks" to take images for the Canadian version of its Street View service, which it hopes to launch "very soon," the company announced earlier this week.

The service, which is already available in cities in the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Australia, Japan and several other countries, provides close-up, 360-degree views of city streets as they would be seen by someone driving along them. The images are linked to the company's Google Maps and Google Earth applications.

Google has collected such images of Canadian cities before, but this time it is letting residents know about it as part of an effort to address privacy concerns that were brought up by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada after the service first launched in the U.S. in 2007, Google spokeswoman Tamara Micner said Thursday.