There won’t be any new Street View pics of Germany from Google. Even after the company won a battle in a German court in March, which ruled that it’s legal in Germany to take pictures from the street even from the Street View camera’s height of 10 feet, a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that it has other priorities:
Our business priority is to use our Google cars to collect data such as street names and road signs to improve our basic maps for our users in a similar way that other mapping companies do.Existing imagery of streets in the 20 cities already covered in Germany will remain. There’s no further info about Google’s reasons for halting its Street View photography, but we’re thinking one reason could be that the company’s growing weary of blurring pictures of buildings requested by German citizens, the number of which is pushing 250,000 at the moment and growing ever larger.
Google’s been acting in good faith throughout this drama, negotiating with the Germans, letting them choose whether they’d like to be included in the Street Views, and facing accusations of gathering data from open Wi-Fi signals, which Google said was inadvertent.
Google’s been having more trouble with Street View in other countries lately as well, including France, where Google was fined $142,000 for privacy violations in March. Different countries have various privacy laws, but we’re not thinking people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they’re walking down a public street. Even so, Google will let anyone in the world opt out of Street View if they so desire.
Tell us in the comments why you think Google has halted its Street View photography in Germany. Could Germany just be the first in a series of countries objecting to Google’s ubiquitous photography?
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