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Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

> This is why google street view sucks in Germany.

Street view in Germany sucks because very rarely there will be a pixelated building front?

Street view in Germany sucks because Google didn't want to deal with so many pixelation requests, so they drastically reduced the coverage.

Those requests would neither have been possible nor come in by such numbers if Germans were not privacy-aware.

your house on the street is public landscape. privacy does not apply on what you see from the road.

without streetview or photos on a public website, only people who are actually passing by my house can see it.

otherwise it is visible to the whole world. that is a drastic difference for a privacy conscious person.

or consider for example me posting a picture of my house without giving any address. there is nothing identifying except the building. with streetview you could potentially find my address. why should you be able to do that?

sure, streetview is nice to use, but i think privacy concerns are real.

> your house on the street is public landscape. privacy does not apply on what you see from the road.

It would be difficult (impossible) for 8 billion people to come over to my street and stare at my house, in the physical world.

So it's very different to expose the view on the internet to all those 8 billion.

Incidentally, Apple just launched Apple Maps Look Around in Germany this summer. It has very good coverage, but you need an Apple device to access it (ugh).

Interestingly, I haven't seen any public discussion on it.

Apple also allows you to demand blurring of your house, but they do this globally.

No, because GSV is at least a decade old in Germany, since the whole "pixelate my building" has understandably been too much of a hassle for Google to push any picture updates.

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