I've been seeing current pictures of my house (in Germany) and surrounding towns on Google Street View for at least four years now. 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.
It's done at scale, not a random regular picture here and there. It's all 360 and almost indistinguishable from Google's material. You can only tell by the car and the logo on its roof, which hasn't been cropped out unlike Google's pictures.
"Google is working closely with a German government privacy agency, ensuring that its imagery meets the country’s data privacy regulations. Among them is a requirement to delete older images, which means that you won’t be able to use Street View to travel as far back in time in Germany as in other countries once the new imagery is live."
Or we encrypt it very well, throw away the key, and wait for computation to catch up :)