BBC reports:
The first images via Google’s Street View service in Germany are live after months of wrangling over privacy.
The first town to be mapped on the service is Oberstaufen, in Bavaria.
Germany is the first country to have negotiated with Google to allow citizens to opt out before the service goes live.
Almost 250,000 Germans have requested that their properties be pixellated in the final imagery.
But in a recent blog on the German roll-out the search giant warned that it would not be able to respond to all requests immediately.
“Given how complex the process is, there will be some houses that people asked us to blur that will be visible when we launch the imagery in a few weeks time.
We’ve worked very hard to keep the numbers as low as possible but int any system like this there will be mistakes,” Andreas Turk, product manager for Street View in Germany said in his blog.
Read more on BBC.
What? If the German people were supposed to be allowed to opt out, how is this okay for Google to just go ahead and post the images anyway? Will the German government accept this? How many is “some” and how many “mistakes” will be tolerable?
Time and time again we see that Google has little regard for local laws.
It just pushes through changes and local authorities give it a little slap on the wrist.
Google has simply gotten too big for its own boots.