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Comment by chiph | Hacker News Reader

When I was buying my house, I used it to check out a neighborhood as a first-cut filter, prior to spending the time & gas to go drive around in person.

If I'm driving somewhere new, I'll use it to identify landmarks for turns. While I'll often have the spoken map directions going on my phone, if the intersection is complex, streetview can help me get into the correct turn lane.

I wanted to use it for Germany prior to a trip a couple of years ago, but it looks like very little of the country has coverage, which is annoying. But it's their country and if they don't want camera cars photographing everything I can understand that.[0]

[0] I had a neighbor get divorced because of streetview. Back when it was new, the first thing everyone did was look up their home. Well, my neighbor saw a custom motorcycle parked out front that was not his.

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I wonder the extent to which doorbell cameras have led to infidelity discoveries. I’m sure people sneak around back and all that, but maybe parked cars show up, or a suspicious spouse asks a neighbor across the street to see their camera footage from a particular day/time.

The neighbor got divorced because they discovered their spouse’s infidelity. The unusual method of discovery is incidental.

You say that today. Back then it was the great unknown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A

What do you mean by "it"? If you're saying the Internet was the great unknown, that doesn't seem to disagree with extra88 at all. The method of discovery -- the Internet = the great unknown -- is incidental to the fact that infidelity was going on .

I don't think it's privacy concerns that lead to Germany not being covered very well, Google just didn't see the benefit of going far beyond the large cities. I live in the suburbs and our sleepy little town has no streetview-coverage at all.

I wonder whether you can use the percentage of blurred houses as a signal for evaluating a neighborhood.

It was for privacy reasons, which is why so many houses are also blurred. Once a house is blurred there's no way to unblur it since Google doesn't take new pictures and as far as I know the blur would still stay at that spot.

Look at every country around Germany and you'll see a web of streets covered by Street View. In Germany it's one big blank [0] and what's covered uses decade old pictures taken before Google stopped mapping Germany on Street View.

[0] https://imgur.com/09Glxyo

I saw a Street View car driving around in Berlin very recently, maybe they have started again?

When you look at that map, you'll see the main cities being covered, but only them. Even rural Romania is mostly covered, while Germany is almost as blank as Bosnia.

Berlin at least still doesn't appear to have any significant added coverage over the past decade. Yes, there are pictures uploaded by users. But the Street View picture seem to be old. In Germany looking at taxis is a good way of telling the age of a picture. All the Street View pictures I clicked on have pre-2010 models. I'd thank they would update the touristic areas or city center first but they seem just as old.

I'd imagine that the privacy backlash is the reason they didn't see the benefit of rolling it out more widely. In most other countries with Street View coverage there's plenty of rural areas covered well. In the UK basically everywhere is included.

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