Official Google Canada Blog

The new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

For over a decade, we’ve been investing in Canada to become a go-to cloud partner for organizations across the country. Whether they’re in financial services, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications or the public sector, a rapidly growing number of organizations located or operating in Canada are choosing Google Cloud to help them build applications better and faster, store data, and deliver awesome experiences to their users, all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. To support this growing customer base, we’re excited to announce that the new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open.

As you’d expect, we’re thrilled about this news, but we aren’t the only ones that have been looking forward to this launch. We asked some of our customers operating in Canada for their take on the upcoming cloud region. Here’s what they had to say:

"Our alliance with Google is truly distinctive in the Canadian market as we are working together to co-innovate and create new services for key industries, including communications technology, healthcare, agriculture, security, and the connected home. The new cloud region in Toronto marks another key milestone that will propel TELUS’ digital leadership by further leveraging the scalability, reliability and cost effectiveness of Google Cloud to support improved customer experience and build stronger, healthier and more sustainable communities."- Hesham Fahmy, Chief Development Officer, TELUS

“We’re simplifying, modernizing and digitizing Scotiabank to enhance the customer experience for our 25 million customers across the globe. By leveraging powerful cloud-based services including Google Cloud, we’re able to put the most advanced software engineering, data analytics and machine learning tools in the hands of our talented employees. We welcome Google Cloud's investment in Toronto and look forward to the opportunities the Toronto Cloud Region will present to our Technology team.”- Michael Zerbs, Group Head Technology & Operations, Scotiabank

“Cloud technologies—and the access to scalable compute, rich geospatial datasets and smart analytics tools—will be critical contributors to support climate action and sustainable policy decisions. At Natural Resources Canada, scientists and researchers are applying innovative digital solutions to support Canada’s natural resource sector. The new Google Cloud region in Toronto will provide our scientists, technologists and researchers with the products and services necessary to turn Earth data into actionable insights.” - Vik Pant, PhD, Chief Scientist and Chief Science Advisor, Natural Resources Canada

“At Accenture, we bring together technology and human ingenuity to create and respond to change. We’re thrilled to join forces with Google Cloud and their newest region in Toronto with an important mutual goal: to accelerate cloud innovation in Canada. Our clients already know us for our deep industry intelligence, cloud-first expertise and market-renowned delivery. We’re now combining that with Google’s human-centric design to bring even more opportunities to our clients across all industries.” - Jeffrey Russell, President of Accenture in Canada

“We are thrilled to see Google’s commitment to Canada. We look forward to helping our joint customers transform their operations, leveraging Google Cloud’s latest data center in Toronto. At Deloitte, we believe cloud is THE opportunity to reimagine everything.”- Terry Stuart, Deloitte Chief Digital Officer, Canada

“As Canadian organizations increasingly leverage cloud to transform their businesses, we are excited about the new opportunities that the Toronto Google Cloud region brings to the market. We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with Google Cloud to bring customized and innovative solutions that help Canadian companies fully realize the value of cloud technology, so that they can compete and win on the global stage.”- Andrew Caprara, Chief Operating Officer, Softchoice

Toronto joins 27 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. In combination with our Montreal region, customers now benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

The new region launches with three zones, allowing organizations of all sizes and industries to distribute apps and storage to protect against service disruptions, and with our core portfolio of Google Cloud Platform products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner, and BigQuery.

We’re working to bring you new cloud products and capabilities in Canada, and our goal is to allow you to access those services quickly and easily—wherever you might be in the country. The past year has proved how important easy access to digital infrastructure, technical education, training and support are to helping businesses respond to the pandemic. We’re particularly proud of the teams who faced the unique challenges of building a cloud region during this time to help our customers and community accelerate their digital transformation.

To support all of our users, customers and government organizations in Canada, we’ll continue to invest in new infrastructure, engineering support and solutions. We’re currently hosting our first ever Google Cloud Accelerator Canada to bring the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to startups doing interesting work in the cloud. We’ve recently received Protected B accreditation with Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, which is crucial for healthcare, education, and regulated industries adopting cloud services. We’re also pleased to announce the preview of Assured Workloads for Canada—a capability which allows you to secure and configure sensitive workloads in accordance with your specific regulatory or policy requirements.

For help migrating to Google Cloud, please contact our local partners. For additional details on Google Cloud regions, please visit our locations page, where you’ll find updates on the availability of additional services and regions. You can always contact us to help you get started or access our many educational resources. We’re excited to see what you build next with Google Cloud.

Posted by Jim Lambe, Managing Director, Canada, Google Cloud

Introducing the Google For Startups Accelerator: Women Founders Class of 2021

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Earlier this summer we shared details about how the Google for Startups Accelerator program is expanding its support for founders from underrepresented groups. In addition to our Black Founders accelerator program, the expansion included a second year of programming specifically designed for women-led startups in North America. We launched the inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders program in 2020, in order to address gender disparity in the startup ecosystem and provide high-quality mentorship opportunities and support for women founders. Studies showed that only 16% of small and medium sized businesses were owned by women, and that women often lack access to venture capitalist funding and accelerator programs to help launch and scale up their businesses.
This year, we have designed another great program for our women founders, and today we are thrilled to announce the 12 women-led startups joining our class of 2021. We’re also excited to share that four Canadian startups from across the country are part of this year’s cohort.
Without further ado, meet the Google For Startups Accelerator: Women Founders class of 2021!

Aquacycl (Escondido, California): Aquacycl makes energy-neutral wastewater treatment a reality, offering modular on-site systems to treat high-strength organic waste streams. The BioElectrochemical Treatment Technology (BETT) is the first commercially viable microbial fuel cell, which generates direct electricity from wastewater, treating untreatable streams and reducing wastewater management costs by 20-60%.
Braze Mobility (Toronto, Ontario): Braze Mobility provides affordable navigation solutions for wheelchair users. It developed the world's first blind spot sensor system that can be attached to any wheelchair, transforming it into a smart wheelchair that automatically detects obstacles and provides alerts to the user through intuitive lights, sounds, and vibrations.
Claira (Grand Rapids, Michigan): Claira is a competency analytics engine that helps organizations understand their people and hire better.
ImagoAI (Saint Paul, Minnesota): ImagoAI’s proprietary AI solution does real-time food safety and quality testing at food manufacturing facilities and on the farms. Its solutions help companies reduce production line hold times by more than 90%, delivering consistent quality products, and reduce waste by early inspection.
Journey Foods (Austin, Texas): Journey Foods solves food science and supply chain inefficiencies with software in order to help companies feed 8 billion people better. They build enterprise technology that improves product management, ingredient intelligence, and manufacturing insights for CPG companies, grocery stores, suppliers, and manufacturers.
Nyquist Data (Palo Alto, California): Nyquist Data helps companies around the world access critical data and insights, which maximizes efficiency, resources, and results for innovation.
Paperstack (Toronto, Ontario): Paperstack is an all-in-one platform that helps self-employed individuals with incorporation, bookkeeping, and taxes.
Pocketnest (Ann Arbor, Michigan): Pocketnest is a comprehensive financial planning tool targeting genX and millennials. The company licenses its software to financial institutions and employers, helping them connect with a younger audience and grow their business. Based on psychology, behavioral science and coaching, it leads users through all ten themes of personal finances, resulting in actionable items and recommendations customized for each user.
SAFETYDOCS Global (Vancouver, British Columbia): SAFETYDOCS Global is a document management solutions platform that streamlines and automates permitting and licensing documentation workflows.
Schoolytics (Washington, DC): Schoolytics, the Student Data Platform, enables schools to connect disparate student datasets, including the student information system (SIS), learning management systems (LMS), and assessments, to transform data into meaningful insights and action. Its web-based tool supports data-driven decision making through real-time analytics and reporting.
Tengiva (Montreal, Quebec): Tengiva is the first digital platform enabling real-time supply chain in the textile industry by optimizing the typical months-long procurement process into a single-click operation.
ThisWay (Austin, Texas): ThisWay matches all people to all jobs, fairly and without bias. The web platform accurately delivers qualified talent, while increasing diversity and inclusion so ROI is optimized.

Starting on September 27, the 10-week intensive virtual program will bring the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to help these businesses reach their goals. Participating startups receive deep mentorship on technical challenges and machine learning, as well as connections to relevant teams across Google. The startups will also receive nontechnical programming to help address some of the unique barriers faced by women founders in the startup ecosystem.
We are excited to welcome these 12 women-led businesses to our Google for Startups Accelerator community, and look forward to working with them this fall!
Posted by Ashley Francisco,Head of Startup Developer Ecosystems, Google Canada

Responsibility is good for business and for the creator economy

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

removing violative contentaising authoritative voices and reducing borderline content

Over fourteen years ago, we launched the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), a first-of-its-kind open monetization program, where anyone who qualified could join and start making money. In fact, we share over half of the revenue generated with creators. And today, YPP continues to be one of the largest drivers of the creator economy in the world. Creators who are part of YPP can make money and earn a living from their content on YouTube with ten different monetization features (and we keep adding more), from advertiser revenue to selling merchandise. Over the last three years, we’ve paid more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies.
Now, more than two million creators participate in YPP globally, including many who might not otherwise have had a platform, from tech reviewers to entertainers. And many of these creators are generating jobs and contributing to local and global economies. In 2019 alone, YouTube’s creative ecosystem supported the equivalent of 345,000 full-time jobs, just in the US. This also means that quality content on everything from how to fix a garage door, to music videos, to lectures on advanced physics, are available for free, to audiences around the world.
Protecting the creative economy This unique business model only works when our viewers, creators and advertisers all have confidence that we are living up to our responsibility as a business. Over the past few years, we’ve been investing in the policies, resources and products needed to protect the community and the vast majority of creators who are producing incredible content, while cracking down on the tiny fraction of bad actors. In fact, in Q4 2020, YouTube’s violative view rate was at 0.16-0.18%, which means that out of every 10,000 views on YouTube, only 16-18 come from violative content. As a result, we’ve seen our focus on responsibility benefit creators and our overall business. In Q2 2021, revenues from YouTube ads crossed $7B and we paid more to YouTube creators and partners than in any quarter in our history.

In addition to our Community Guidelines, creators need to meet an even higher bar to join the YouTube Partner Program and make money on YouTube. Every channel applying to YPP undergoes review by a trained rater to make sure it meets our policies. We also regularly review and remove channels that don’t comply with our policies. For example, we’ve been removing channels from YPP that repeatedly brush up against our hate speech, harassment and misinformation policies.
Since advertising has been at the core of creators’ revenue, we need to ensure that advertisers have faith in our systems and feel comfortable with where their ads appear. Advertisers do not want their brands associated with problematic content and actors, and we’ve seen first-hand that they vote with their feet. When advertisers lack trust in our systems, they scale back their spend on YouTube. This affects the entire ecosystem, not just the very small number of bad actors.
We’ve partnered closely with advertisers to address their feedback, and today we're at least 99% effective at ensuring brand safety for advertisers. As a result, YouTube was the first digital platform to be accredited for content level brand safety by the Media Rating Council. YouTube was also one of the founding members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a multi-stakeholder initiative to improve digital and brand safety with advertisers. As part of this initiative, we’ve helped establish a set of industry standards to define content not suitable for advertising.
With improved systems and increased advertiser trust, we’re growing the pie and making channels in YPP more successful as a whole. The number of new channels joining YPP in 2020 more than doubled when compared to the year before. And the number of YouTube channels making 6 figures in revenue or more is up more than 35% year over year in the US.
Extending our trust in YPP Creators Creators in YPP have access to programs and products that give them more control over the monetization of their channel. With our Self-Certification program, they can rate their own videos against our advertiser-friendly guidelines. Our systems verify creators’ ratings, and the more accurate they are, the more our system uses their ratings over time. As a result, creators who accurately rate their content have seen a reduction in classifier mistakes by more than 50%.
We’ve also rolled out a new “Checks” process which automatically screens creators’ uploads for potential copyright claims and ad suitability restrictions. This helps creators understand how their videos will monetize and make edits before uploading if they want.
As a result of these efforts, the vast majority of content uploaded by channels in YPP meets the ad-friendly thresholds and is suitable for all advertisers. In fact, just a single digit percent of videos monetized by creators receive a yellow dollar sign icon (meaning they show limited or no ads). This is a win for advertisers and creators alike.
Helping Creators Expand their Business Over the past few years, we’ve been working to build a multi-faceted business that helps YouTube creators grow and diversify their revenue. We now offer ten different ways for creators to earn revenue, such as ads, subscriptions, branded content, merchandising, Paid Digital Goods and more.
We continue investing in new tools that help creators earn money while strengthening the relationship with their viewers, such as our new Super Thanks tool. And because we’re deeply committed to supporting the next generation of creators, we also offer other ways for creators (both on YPP and outside of YPP) to make money, such as the Shorts Fund.
Finding new ways to reward trusted creators financially and help them ramp up their businesses will always be a top priority for us.
YouTube is built on the premise of openness, which allows millions of creators to find a voice and a community. However, we set a higher bar for what channels can make money on our platform. We have every incentive to continue to tackle problematic content on our platform: it is not just the right thing for our viewers and creators, it’s also good for business. We’ll continue our responsibility work even as we continue to grow the YouTube Partner Program, and we consider these investments core to the future success of the creator economy at large.

How We’re Supporting the 2021 Federal Election

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Given the importance of accurate election information, we recognize that Google and YouTube have a role to play in helping connect Canadians to authoritative information and reducing the spread of misinformation. That’s why Google and YouTube support the Declaration of Online Electoral Integrity, which aims to safeguard the digital accessibility of accurate, trusted and up-to-date election information, for all Canadians. Since our earliest days, we have been committed to supporting democratic processes around the world which is why we’ve had Community Guidelines on YouTube and Content Policies for Google Search, which govern what videos or content are allowed, or will be surfaced, on the platform, and which we rigorously enforce.

Google Search - Connecting Canadians to useful and authoritative information
We fundamentally design our Search systems to prioritize relevant information from credible sources. We see billions of search queries every day, so we take an unbiased approach to delivering information that is both relevant and reliable. We also provide useful features, which not only make authoritative information easily accessible, but also helps users understand the information they find in Google Search. In order to ensure we’re providing the most helpful information, we have a set of policies that apply to our Google Search features, such as featured snippets, Autocomplete and Knowledge Panels.
The quality of Google Search is safeguarded by evaluations from search quality raters, who train and test our systems. Search quality raters orient our rankings around delivering high-quality information, particularly for important topics relating to a user’s wellbeing and livelihood, such as health and civics information. We have definitions in our publicly-available Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which outline the characteristics of web pages that may aim to mislead users, promote hate, or otherwise deliver low-quality information; these guidelines define what constitutes high-quality information.
For topics regarding health, finance, or civics, where authoritative information is crucial, we place an even greater emphasis on the digital signals of expertise and authoritativeness. This way, we can have greater confidence that the information appearing at the top of the results page is trusted information.

YouTube - A platform for authoritative content
On YouTube, over the last couple years we’ve significantly increased our investments in the systems and processes that enable us to effectively remove violative videos, raise up authoritative content, and reduce the spread of borderline content, all while offering an open platform for healthy political discourse. Our Community Guidelines do not allow misleading claims about voting, nor do they allow any content that encourages interference in the democratic process. In addition, we have established policies prohibiting hate speech, harassment, deceptive practices and incitement to violence. For example, under our violent or graphic content policy, we remove content inciting others to commit violent acts against individuals, or a group of persons, at voting locations. Under our voter suppression policy, we remove content falsely claiming mail-in ballots have been manipulated to change the results of an election. We consistently enforce our policies regardless of political viewpoints, or whoever may express those viewpoints. Any content that provides sufficient educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context is allowed on YouTube.
The removal of violative content is just one of the ways we protect the YouTube community. Fast-moving events, like elections, may produce unverified claims, which can then lead to uncertainty. Providing viewers with accurate information is critical in moments like this, which is why we work to raise up authoritative election-related information and reduce the spread of harmful election-related misinformation.

Federal Election Information and the Canada Elections Act
To help you learn more about participating in the democratic process, we’ll continue to promote links to timely, relevant information. Prior to Election Day, Canadians will be able to watch live streams of the official federal leaders’ debates on YouTube. On Election Day, you’ll be able to find a link on the YouTube and Google.ca homepages directing you to information from Elections Canada on how and where to vote. Then, as polls close, on YouTube you’ll see a selection of live streams of election night coverage from authoritative news partners so that, as in previous elections, you can come to YouTube throughout the evening to watch Election Night unfold.
And we’ll continue to elevate authoritative sources, including news publishers like Global News and Radio-Canada, for election-related news and information queries, in Google Search results and YouTube’s Breaking News and Top News shelves. And our recommendations systems will also continue limiting the spread of harmful election-related misinformation and borderline content.
Per Google’s existing policy, we will not accept election advertising on our platforms during a federal election period regulated by the Canada Elections Act. We first implemented this policy following the changes put in place by Bill C-76 for the 2019 election.
Our teams will be working around the clock, to make sure we have the systems and policies in place to prevent any abuse of our systems, and to provide consistent access to authoritative information this election season. We remain vigilant and are committed to maintaining the important balance of openness and responsibility, on Election Day, and beyond.
See you at the polls, Canada!

New safety and digital wellbeing options for younger people on YouTube and YouTube Kids

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Today, we're announcing additional protections for people under 18 on YouTube and YouTube Kids.
Younger people use YouTube every day to discover new interests, learn about the world, and connect with the world through online video. But it's essential that as they do, they have the options and safeguards to create the experience that's right for them.
Over the years, we’ve made investments to protect kids and families, such as launching a dedicated kids app, introducing new data practices for children’s content, providing more age-appropriate experiences, and giving families more choice with supervised accounts. Today, we're announcing additional protections for people under 18 on YouTube and YouTube Kids.
Updating default privacy settings for younger people In the coming weeks, we’ll gradually start adjusting the default upload setting to the most private option available for users ages 13-17 on YouTube. With private uploads,content can only be seen by the user and whomever they choose. We want to help younger users make informed decisions about their online footprint and digital privacy, including encouraging them to make an intentional choice if they’d like to make their content public. If the user would like to make their content public, they can change the default upload visibility setting and we’ll provide reminders indicating who can see their video. Making digital wellbeing features more prominent We want to give younger users the tools they need to understand their use of technology. In addition to our suite of digital well-being tools, we’ll be turning take a break and bedtime reminders on by default for all users ages 13-17 on YouTube.
We’ll also be turning autoplay off by default for these users. If a user decides these aren’t the right digital well-being features for them, they can change their default settings. We’ll also be adding an autoplay option on YouTube Kids and turning autoplay off by default in the app. Whether you’re driving on a roadtrip with your kids or listening to nursery rhymes together while cooking dinner, we want to empower parents to be able to choose an autoplay setting that’s right for their family. In the coming months, we’ll also be launching additional parental controls in the YouTube Kids app, including the ability for a parent to choose a “locked” default autoplay setting.
Providing safeguards and education about commercial content We’re also making changes to how we treat commercial content for kids and families. We've never allowed paid product placements in YouTube Kids, our destination for younger kids. In the coming weeks, we’ll also begin to remove overly commercial content from YouTube Kids, such as a video that only focuses on product packaging or directly encourages children to spend money.
On YouTube, we recently updated the disclosures that appear on “made for kids” content or supervised accounts on YouTube when a creator identifies that their video contains paid promotions. Developed in collaboration with child development experts, the disclosures appear in easy-to-understand text and link to a kid-friendly animated video, which provides additional information on paid product placements. We’ve also provided a parent guide which suggests ways for parents to help children understand content they may see on YouTube, including paid product promotions.

We’re introducing these new safety and digital wellbeing options as part of our ongoing efforts to create age-appropriate experiences for young people on YouTube and YouTube Kids. With young people watching online videos to broaden their horizons and expand their learning experiences, we're invested in being the best version of YouTube and YouTube Kids we can be. Young people are our future, and we want to empower them the best we can.

Posted by James Beser, Director of Product Management

Giving kids and teens a safer experience online

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Family LinkBe Internet AwesomeYouTube Kids appKids Spaceteacher approved apps in Play
Technology has helped kids and teens during the pandemic stay in school through lockdowns and maintain connections with family and friends. As kids and teens spend more time online, parents, educators, child safety and privacy experts, and policy makers are rightly concerned about how to keep them safe. We engage with these groups regularly, and share these concerns.
Some countries are implementing regulations in this area, and as we comply with these regulations, we’re looking at ways to develop consistent product experiences and user controls for kids and teens globally. Today, we’re announcing a variety of new policies and updates:
Giving minors more control over their digital footprint While we already provide a range of removal options for people using Google Search, children are at particular risk when it comes to controlling their imagery on the internet. In the coming weeks, we’ll introduce a new policy that enables anyone under the age of 18, or their parent or guardian, to request the removal of their images from Google Image results. Of course, removing an image from Search doesn’t remove it from the web, but we believe this change will help give young people more control of their images online.
Tailoring product experiences for kids and teens Some of our most popular products help kids and teens explore their interests, learn more about the world, and connect with friends. We’re committed to constantly making these experiences safer for them. That’s why in the coming weeks and months we're going to make a number of changes to Google Accounts for people under 18:

YouTube: We’re going to change the default upload setting to the most private option available for teens ages 13-17. In addition we’ll more prominently surface digital wellbeing features, and provide safeguards and education about commercial content. Learn more about these changes here.
Search: We have a range of systems, tools, and policies that are designed to help people discover content from across the web while not surprising them with mature content they haven’t searched for. One of the protections we offer is SafeSearch, which helps filter out explicit results when enabled and is already on by default for all signed-in users under 13 who have accounts managed by Family Link. In the coming months, we’ll turn SafeSearch on for existing users under 18 and make this the default setting for teens setting up new accounts.
Assistant: We’re always working to prevent mature content from surfacing during a child’s experience with Google Assistant on shared devices, and in the coming months we’ll be introducing new default protections. For example, we will apply our SafeSearch technology to the web browser on smart displays.
Location History: Location History is a Google account setting that helps make our products more useful. It's already off by default for all accounts, and children with supervised accounts don’t have the option of turning Location History on. Taking this a step further, we’ll soon extend this to users under the age of 18 globally, meaning that Location History will remain off (without the option to turn it on).
Play: Building on efforts like content ratings, and our "Teacher-approved apps" for quality kids content, we're launching a new safety section that will let parents know which apps follow our Families policies. Apps will be required to disclose how they use the data they collect in greater detail, making it easier for parents to decide if the app is right for their child before they download it.
Google Workspace for Education: As we recently announced, we’re making it much easier for administrators to tailor experiences for their users based on age (such as restricting student activity on YouTube). And to make web browsing safer, K-12 institutions will have SafeSearch technology enabled by default, while switching to Guest Mode and Incognito Mode for web browsing will be turned off by default.

New advertising changes We’ll be expanding safeguards to prevent age-sensitive ad categories from being shown to teens, and we will block ad targeting based on the age, gender, or interests of people under 18. We’ll start rolling out these updates across our products globally over the coming months. Our goal is to ensure we’re providing additional protections and delivering age-appropriate experiences for ads on Google.
New digital wellbeing tools In Family Link, parents can set screen time limits and reminders for their kids’ supervised devices. And, on Assistant-enabled smart devices, we give parents control through Digital Wellbeing tools available in the Google Home app. In the coming months, we’ll roll out new Digital Wellbeing filters that allow people to block news, podcasts, and access to webpages on Assistant-enabled smart devices. On YouTube, we’ll turn on take a break and bedtime reminders and turn off autoplay for users under 18. And, on YouTube Kids we’ll add an autoplay option and turn it off by default to empower parents to make the right choice for their families.
Improving how we communicate our data practices to kids and teens Data plays an important role in making our products functional and helpful. It’s our job to make it easy for kids and teens to understand what data is being collected, why, and how it is used. Based on research, we’re developing engaging, easy-to-understand materials for young people and their parents to help them better understand our data practices. These resources will begin to roll out globally in the coming months.

Ongoing work and engagement We regularly engage with kids and teens, parents, governments, industry leaders, and experts in the fields of privacy, child safety, wellbeing and education to design better, safer products for kids and teens. Having an accurate age for a user can be an important element in providing experiences tailored to their needs. Yet, knowing the accurate age of our users across multiple products and surfaces, while at the same time respecting their privacy and ensuring that our services remain accessible, is a complex challenge. It will require input from regulators, lawmakers, industry bodies, technology providers, and others to address it – and to ensure that we all build a safer internet for kids.

Posted by Mindy Brooks, General Manager, Kids and Families

11 things to love about the new Nest Cam and Doorbell

Thursday, August 5, 2021

1. Smarter alerts, right out of the box: Your new Nest Cam and Doorbell can do more right out of the box because we moved object detection on-device, allowing us to include features that are usually behind a subscription (like Activity Zones and smart alerts, including package, animal, vehicle and person detection) for no additional cost, plus three hours of event video history. Thanks to on-device processing, they can also record up to a week’s worth of events if power or Wi-Fi is out.

2. Made with Machine Learning: Building a camera that uses ML to recognize objects requires showing the ML model millions of images first. Our new Nest Cameras and Doorbells have been trained on 40 million images to accommodate lots of different environments and lighting conditions. Thanks to a cutting edge TPU chip, our new cameras run an ML model up to 7.5 times per second, so reliability and accuracy are even better.

3. Works in any home: Nest Cam and Doorbell’s wire-free designs, built-in rechargeable batteries and optional power connectors allow you to install where you want — not only where there’s a power outlet or pre-existing wiring.

4. Set up your way: Make sure to check out Google Store’s accessories. In addition to weatherproof cables, a tabletop stand with a power cord allows you to place your Nest Cam on an indoor surface, like a mantle. There’s also an anti-theft mount that tethers your Nest Cam to the magnetic mount for extra security. For Nest Doorbell, there’s a horizontal wedge and an AC adapter.

5. Works better, together: Nest Cam and Nest Doorbell seamlessly work with your Nest displays. Just say “Hey Google, show me the backyard” to see your Nest Cam feed. And you can set up your speakers and displays to chime when someone rings your Nest Doorbell, while using your display to see who’s at the door and take action from the screen.

6. All on the Google Home app: It’s easy to see all of your events quickly, and your 24/7 live feed at any time in the Google Home app. If you have more than one Nest camera, you can view all of them in one place, alongside your other connected home devices. You can even filter by event type — for example, you can pull up every package delivery.

7. See clearly in a variety of conditions: Both Nest Cam and Nest Doorbell have night vision and HDR so images are crisp in the dark or bright light. And we gave Nest Doorbell a taller field of view so you can see visitors from head to toe and packages as close as eight inches away from your door.

8. Extra secure with a Google account: Your devices are only as secure as your account. That’s why the new Nest Cam and Nest Doorbell require a Google account, which comes with added protections like suspicious activity detection, 2-step verification and password checkup. Read more about our commitment to privacy and security in Nest’s dedicated Safety Center.

9. Add a Nest Aware subscription: With a Nest Aware subscription (C$8 monthly), you’ll get familiar face detection and the ability to call 911 from the Google Home app (U.S. only) as well as 30 days of event video history. With a Nest Aware Plus subscription (C$16 monthly), you’ll get all of this with 60 days of event video history and the option for 10 days of continuous video recording when your Nest Cam is plugged in using weatherproof cables.

10. Made with care: Nest Cam and Doorbell are made with recycled materials and rigorously tested through drops and extreme weather like heavy rain and hurricane-strength winds.

11. Built for your life: Nest technology is designed to fit into your home, not distract from it. Nest Cam is sleek and white and fits in anywhere — indoors or outdoors. And Nest Doorbell’s design was inspired by clean, minimalist architecture. In the U.S., it comes in four different colors so your front door can make a great first impression.

The new battery-powered Nest Cam and Nest Doorbell are available for pre-order today for $239.99 — you can visit the Google Store to find out more, and if the Nest Cam and Nest Doorbell will be available in your country.

Official Canada Blog