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Comment by javindo | Hacker News Reader

Surprised Germany is so resistant, although I suppose there was that WiFi SSID collection scandal which caused tension.

Google received 200k+ formal objections from house-owners to remove/pixelate their properties for privacy concerns. This caused a huge delay and as far as i know they're not planning to add any new cities anytime soon.

As a German, I guess 90% of us would love to have a complete Street View coverage...

But maybe other Germans would guess a different percentage?

Not necessarily. With the German privacy protection laws, it sounds like just 1% of the population could easily cause enough grief to make mapping prohibitively expensive. According to this

http://searchengineland.com/google-has-stopped-street-view-p...

250k homes and businesses requested to have their property blurred out, which is indeed much less than 1% of the population.

A tiny fraction of those who would oppose having their property shown on street view would be aware of it and take the time to do anything about it. So 250k people is quite a lot, and probably means a much larger percent of the population are bothered by it.

Nah, there was a huge media campaign against Street View. It was used by polititian to gain some "we care for you" profile and was mainly driven by the media companies that have a strong anti google stance in germany mainly because they want a part of Google's profits.

It would be interesting to know how many of those 250k feel that Street View is a useful service, but just don't want their own home/business on it.

http://searchengineland.com/google-has-stopped-street-view-p... (2011)

That, and people can ask Google to take out any depictions of their property if they so desire. That is part of an agreement between Google and a Hamburg official responsible for privacy issues.

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