Germany vs. Google: How Street View Won the Privacy Battle in Europe
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
Other services offer very similar images (e.g. https://www.mapillary.com/app/?pKey=305780994287217, also Apple Maps as shown in https://www.androidpolice.com/apple-google-street-view-germa...) and nobody cared.
This was about Google, and it was at a time where the large German publishers tried to monetize Google Search linking to them (again not caring much about anybody else doing the same kind of indexing and linking), and the Street View frenzy was to a large part a media campaign. My pet theory is that they tried to reign in on the advertising competition.
Likelihood for a shot of a house and one person in front of it, facing the camera, is non-zero.
Could be a passersby or even the person living there leaving their house.
Both don't qualify for "panoramafreiheit", afaik.
Google was just a good exemplary case.
What I'm not sure about is the freedom to photograph buildings per se.
AFAIK, "panoramafreiheit" applies here. But Google just chose to bow to every removal request, since manually checking them would have been to expensive.
Blurring entire buildings was the compromise made specifically for Germany[1], but that was used so much that further bring-up of Street View probably wasn't worth their while. And that was to some degree due to the media frenzy back in the day. I mean, some people actually thought it would be live video of every location! (yes, Germany has its share of tech-illiterate hillbillies, and wow, are they vocal...)
So now Google tries again and crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's and this article has the following to say about this: "In a somewhat transparent attempt to avoid the same issues as in 2010 and 2011, Google is working alongside a German privacy commission this time", as if working with the DPAs is something sinister. "somewhat transparent attempt", really?
You just can't please some people...
[1] Side note: France doesn't have an equivalent to the freedom of panorama, and stuff like the illumination pattern of the Eiffel tower falls under copyright, with cases prosecuted for that. Yet it was pretty much fully visible on Street View from early on.
Panoramafreiheit proper is really just about copyright, people have nothing to do with it. There's a separate law regarding pictures of people, with the aforementioned exception for people that have just incidentally been captured (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/kunsturhg/BJNR000070907.h...).
Panoramafreiheit just covers the copyright part, in case any part of the building design is considered a copyrighted work of art. Everything else just falls under the fact that German law knows no "right to pictures of your own property" (unlike the "right to pictures of your own image", which is a part of German law).
"Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has admitted he was wrong to brand the scandal of lost CDs containing the personal data of millions of Britons a "storm in a teacup" after falling victim to an internet scam.
The outspoken star printed his bank details in a newspaper to try and make the point that his money would be safe and that the spectre of identity theft was a sham.
He also gave instructions on how to find his address on the electoral roll and details about the car he drives.
However, in a rare moment of humility Clarkson has now revealed the stunt backfired and his details were used to set up a £500 direct debit payable from his account to the British Diabetic Association."
It was a bit of a nuisance at times to roll back a few fraudulent transactions but apart from calling up the bank and making it their problem (maybe 1h of life time lost to that, in total), the damage to the charity created by publishing the bank account information has been 0€ in well over 10 years.
Those are regular accounts, neither bank offers some kind of "ingress only" bank account number (that automatically clears to the real account, or something like that), even though that would save _them_ time.
And also that information:
> In a somewhat transparent attempt to avoid the same issues as in 2010 and 2011, Google is working alongside a German privacy commission this time.
> Has people’s view of Street View changed since then or has the German desire for privacy evolved? My money is on the latter, although there’s no doubt that some people find Street View so useful that it’s worth the potential invasion of privacy.
> Even in 2009 and 2010, some German communities were rallying for Street View to pick their city, in the hopes that it would jumpstart tourism and the local economies, which had undoubtedly taken a hit in the 2008 economic crash.
> As time passes, people who lived through German surveillance states die, replaced by a younger generation with no first-hand experience and the fears that come with it. Besides, tech companies like Google and Meta have encroached on privacy one small step at a time.
> Like the famous allegory about a frog being slowly boiled alive, privacy violations don’t seem so upsetting when delivered bit by bit over time. One of the world’s most private societies was a longtime holdout to the behemoth that is Google, but it, too, has been boiled.
Au contraire. Did you read the last three paragraphs? Major changes can happen gradually.
you want "data" on the fact that new generations come along?
Not everything has to look like a Wikipedia article.
Generational change. Memory of the Stazi fades with every new generation.
The frog has been boiled in the waters of surveillance capitalism slow and long enough now.
On the other hand, Google Maps does make use of the public transport API, which is extremely useful.