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Street View On iOS Pierces German Privacy Veil
jfruhlinger writes "After some prickly negotiations with the German government's privacy regulators, Google got permission to launch its Street View service for German addresses, so long as people had the right to opt out and choose to have only a blurred version of their homes on the service. But it turns out that iPhone and iPad users can see those buildings after all."
Those aren't photos of your house! Google uses photos of houses from a Universe which is only fractionally different from ours. The terrain's totally the same there. The only difference is that 99% of the people use Linux except for an exclusive club of Microsoft users.
It appears that here in Germany, we don't care much whether our ISP is obliged to keep all our internet traffic on file for months, our web access can be arbitrarily and secretly limited, our radio organizations can demand listener fees from everyone with an internet connection and shit like ACTA can get dictated on us from the copyright mafia... ... but DON'T YOU DARE put a photo of my HOUSE on the INTERNET.
Thanks for the tea party, America; at least that way there are a few things left we can feel smugly superior about.
The streetview service is not illegal in Germany. Google voluntarily pixels houses if people living there demand it. They don't have to. Other services like sightwalk.de do it without for years.
It seems Google "removed" some of the images and replaced them with a black background and the message:
This image is under review and will be available soon.
just as well, as 99.999% of us have lives that cause relatively little/no damage, & the other 00.001% are simply victims of unfoundead 'conspiracy' notions. therefore, the real damage that's being done is just in our 'imaginations'? FUDge on. may as well take pictures of what we still have, so we'll have stuff to look at/remember. like what was real, as opposed to what never was?
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Maybe I didn't look long enough, but from what I can tell, the streetview coverage in Germany at this time is close to nil. Only a small part of a small village which, oh surprise, has a "blacked out house" is present. To me, this seems like either a function test for the feature or a demonstration on how the feature could work to the interested people. Either way, this would also explain the lapse in mobile versions of google maps.
Or did they already rollback on streetview release for Germany after enabling it and then realizing the mistake?
The German government may pretend that hiding images of buildings and people visible from public streets is "privacy" but it's merely privacy theater.
Germany's government has one of the wost records on privacy among European nations, pushing for data retention, registration of religions beliefs with the government, extensive electronic government surveillance, even aerial photography of people's backyards.
So, don't feed the German government trolls: don't call this restriction of photography "privacy".
Believe it or not !!
If Google wanted to get the issue more attention, it could have blocked the entire service for the entire country. One of two things would happen ... people would protest their government and ask that the service be reinstated through a change in laws or an exemption ... or a Google competitor would provide the services with the blurring feature. I'm guessing the changes of the second happening were too high. The blurring is a relatively easy thing for them to implement, but sometimes it's nice to force an issue more into the public eye to make people think about it a bit more.
Except perhaps that public opinion in Germany is against Google in this regard.
People want an ability to opt out of such a service. Quite in the same sense as
people opt out of the phone book.
Phone numbers are public information, still you can tell corporations that you
don't want them to publish them.
If they blocked this service right now, chances are, people wouldn't protest
exactly for it.
An excellent analogy, even without the car.
This only happens if you really do not understand your own application. In addition, anybody with at least a bit security knowledge would have blurred in the source material, thereby making this screwup impossible.
Seems the times were Google was a technology leader are over.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The argument seems coherent until we discover phone numbers are not exactly public information that everyone and their dog can see while strolling about on public streets.
Imagine you painted your phone number in big letters over the street-facing side of your house and THEN demand everyone leave out the number from their photos.
Ridiculous.
But most of my fellow Germans are currently riding the hardcore eco-socialist wave and technological innovations don't exactly fall on fertile ground right now in this country. A few more of these "get-off-my-lawn" follies and we've successfully reduced this once-great country to a ecologically superior open-air museum of life in the good old days. If critics of this neo-luddite craze are publicly asking in editorials if automobile and plane, where they invented today, would have a chance of NOT being verboten instantly. Only to receive angry letters that planes and automobiles ought to be made illegal as soon as possible...
And if everyone and their pet could see this information if they walked
by, so what?
My supposed dog is not a corporation doing systematic surveillance
of virtually all of our country. The point being systematic.
The lawmaker as well as public opinion came to the opinion that this
ought to at least be regulated. Which is not really surprising,
we _are_ in germany after all. This wouldn't feel like home if there
were stuff that is unregulated, would it?
Regarding the rant at the end of your post,
You know, there were protests against automobiles back in the day.
Scares horses and kids. Stinks. Is loud, too fast.
The germany of today is pancakes compared to the imperial
germany that saw the introduction of motorcars and airplanes.
I mean, they introduced regulation for church bell ringing.
This place (even more than today) was like one big allotment
gardening complex.
Still, as today, the industry managed to produce innovative
products (that you allege not to have a chance today).
God let this be a troll.
You are one of the reasons the world laughs about the US. Are your parents siblings?
An American company still has to abide German law if they drive around in Germany and take pictures.
You know that US-Law is not the law outside the US?
I had the house i'm living in be blurred out of street view.
Why? Because when anybody wants to find out that my Landlord still has the X-Mas decoration on the porch in February, they have to come here.
a Google competitor would provide the services with the blurring feature
Actually, a German company provides a kind of street view without blurring whatsoever, and has a playground search engine too, and people apparently like it.
But when Google does it, it is somehow violation of privacy.