Google Street Brawl: Say Nein, Get Egged
Posted by Jennifer Sokolowsky on November 25, 2010 03:00 PM
Google users are finally getting a chance to view the streets of major cities in Germany — several years after the images were taken.
Google’s Street View service has caused much more controversy in privacy-sensitive Germany than in many other countries, with advocates such as the consumer protection minister, Isle Aigner, calling the service a violation of privacy.
Street View? Call it Street Brawl.
While some polls indicated that more than half of Germans opposed having their homes recorded by Google's global mapping team, only 244,000 people, or 3% of German households, asked to be left out of the images. Some Germans opting out had their homes egged; others, it seems, protested in other ways.
Google brought on 200 employees to help with the task of blurring out the buildings of people who asked to be excluded, and it says that residents can ask to be blurred out at any time. It is also pixelating people’s faces and vehicle license plates.
As of last week, street views of 20 German cities can now be found on the service including Berlin, Bielefeld, Bochum, Bonn, Bremen, Cologne, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Hanover, Leipzig, Mannheim, Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Wuppertal.
However, Google is not totally off the hook yet in Germany: The government is still investigating the company’s admission that its cars gathering Street View data also inadvertently captured other data from unsecured wi-fi connections.
U.S. authorities are also investigating and the UK information commissioner recently said that Google will delete the data “as soon as possible,” although Google will not be fined or prosecuted.
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