Google Street View returns to Germany after 10 Years

Google has access to the pictures without the blur of faces and car plates and what not. It is very reasonable to not want a spyware company to roam your streets and record it.

I think it's a uniquely German problem, because nowhere else in the EU did Google have to blur buildings. Having immigrated to Germany I can tell that Germans are pretty much privacy-obsessed, with strict regulations on CCTV (you will get in trouble if your camera points to the street) and hardly anyone having a social media account.

Who is this hypothetical person who is upset with some types of surveillance and not others? I would imagine many Germans feel (like I do) equally uncomfortable with Street View, satellite image databases, widespread CCTV cameras in cities, etc.

Germans have a thing for americans, and they are often enforcing their standards to the rest of EU

There's a quite significant event in Germany's history where the government abused data about it's citizens in a horrific way. They clearly learned a lesson from that.

That person doesn't really exist, at least not in Germany which this is about. The issue was never just Street View. Ubiquitous surveillance has been a topic for a long time, in German fashion we invented a phrase for it, "Gläserner Bürger", literally a 'glass citizen'. It's no accident we're a huge outlier when it comes to cash payments as well, people like their anonymity.

As for the encryption debate, the difference is that it is literally that, a democratic debate. There's still a difference here between trade-offs being made for national security or policing, and private firms just running circles around you to make more dollars. The latter will always cause more anger.

You treat the whole EU as if it was one single person. You heard different news over the years, but they are from different fractions of the EU and Germany.

Yes, there are weasel politicians who will jump at the opportunity to give more power to themselves and big corporations even if a poor right wing factory worker in East Germany hates big tech surveillance. Yes, you'll find people who prefer the convenience of G Street View and are willing to give up some of their privacy for that.

But there will be people who see this as one more concession to the surveillance state, so they will fight it. Give an inch and they'll take a mile. Germans remember this from Nazi Germany, WW2, and the mass surveillance of East Germany (and some now have even more paranoia after the COVID lockdowns).

So no, I don't think you'll have too many people who are seriously upset about Google "scanning" the whole country but are happy about having cameras everywhere and governments installing spyware onto our phones.

Sir this is Hacker News. You need to convince German real estate owner class.

> are totally fine with satellite images.

Satellite images won't show private areas. It's even hard to tell anything significant about the area besides that something is there.

> Or cameras getting installed everywhere

They follow privacy laws, don't record private areas, and are not public accessible. There are also generally less security cameras in Germany than in similar countries AFAIK.

If I had to guess, for Germany, you have basically two groups opposing it vocally, the die-hard privacy advocates (<5%) and the "inter-what?" group which does not understand how the internet, let alone how street-view, works (~20%).

Latter group actually argued that street-view would be used by burglars to identify possible targets in real-time. I recall on of these i***** to propose German police to patrol street-view!

With the large majority being neutral/positive on the topic, but not motivated to argue publicly against the other two groups. And so, again, the fringes win.

Anecdotally, in Berlin almost all street view pics are from 2008. It's actually kinda nice to take a tour of the past that way sometimes!

As all Geoguessr players know, official Street View coverage in Germany was extremely limited and all very old. There was a small amount of coverage in around a dozen or so of the largest cities that dated back to the mid-2000s and that's about it. There's also various bits of crowdsourced unofficial coverage in the country which you are perhaps referring to, but it's very limited. Just go to Google Maps, look at Europe, and grab the Street View person, and you'll see.

> They've been uploaded by some third party. No one cared in the slightest. I don't understand why this is news now.

Not saying it's right or wrong but there is a big difference between some random people uploading photos every now and then VS a huge conglomerate with huge resources repeatedly mapping everything with 360 photos. I can understand why one might make the news and the other doesn't.

There were news articles insinuating that those pictures were live or close to it. The whole "discussion" back then was sad to see.

From the article

  Like in other countries, it will be possible to opt out of Street View coverage with the option to pixelate your home or business. Google is starting with a blank slate, so anyone who obfuscated their house a decade ago will have to request it once more.

It mentions in the article they will.

Of course that's possible, if only to calm the nerves of the public (I don't think there is a legal obligation). However, hardly anyone requested it for Apple's equivalent product.

Do you mean that thing that blurs a specific building? I’ve always thought that was a great example of the Streisand effect. It’s not like someone can’t walk/drive there and see it anyway.

As an inexperienced and anxious driver (from a tiny suburban / village area / town), Street View (and its alternatives) are god sent to me.

I up front plan my trip, every twist and turn, especially in densely populated areas. I'm not used to driving in dense urban environments with multi-lane streets, so knowing what's gonna happen, when, and how it's going to look is immensely important to me to keep my anxiety under control.

I hope they also permit restoring addresses to street view as well. Apparently it's permanently removed in the US which is a bane for some who are trying to sell their house or have bought a house that was blurred and want it shown.

https://support.google.com/maps/thread/5010142/i-want-to-unb...

It's a bit of a chilling effect for people who want to blur their house and not affect its value and could even be used nefariously.

Where's the loss?

Also, what if my neighbor removes my apartment building, but I want it to be on street view?

Apple already has recent street view of Germany and nobody cared.