Launching Google Street View in Germany must be harder than giving birth
After a lot of back and forth, Google finally announced that it is about to launch Street View in 20 German cities before the end of the year. But to comply with the requirements of notoriously supercritical German politicians and privacy advocates, Google will give every citizen the chance to prevent the company from publishing photos of their houses. In these cases, Google will blur the pictures shown on Street View.
In order to achieve that, people have to fill out an online form or send a written letter. The Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection is even providing a draft for everyone to print and send to Google's headquarter in Hamburg.
Of course, all this is just the continuation of a tedious debate about the value and importance of privacy in the digital age in Germany.But while the conflicts surrounding Google Street View have been extremely annoying, at least we see some funny ideas to ridicule the exaggerated Street View discussion:
First, we have a movement of users who plan to take, publish and geotag a photo of every house that has been removed from Google Street View after residents have objected. And second, there is another, "unoffocial" letter draft which you can send to Google in order to object possible objections regarding the removal of photos from Street View. So if you live in Germany and have neighbours that you suspect could make the effort to forbid the publication of photos on Street View, you could use that draft.
I'm pretty sure this wasn't the last chapter in the German Google Street View soap opera. A pathetic and sad soap opera that was not nice to watch. And while Street View even made it into the main TV news, hardly anybody in Germany heard about today's really important Google related news - news which could change the Internet forever (for the worse).
