Google Street View in Germany

I was driving home from work today when I saw the google street view camera car, opened my window and waved. So looks like I will be on the street view when you look for Bockenheimer Warte. 🙂

Streetview is coming to 3 German cities: Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin, and this has gotten some weird press. Germans are very privacy-sensitive, more so than other nationalities, anyway. But some of the arguments against Street View, while possible, or even true, seem petty, paranoid and irrelevant. Basically, it seems like an exercise in neo-luddite nay-saying in the name of the people.

For example, sure thieves can stake out neighborhoods and look for nice cars to steal, but you would still have to know where to look, and you would still need to go there to stake it out. Or the fact that some people don’t like other people looking at their house. Hello? What about all those people walking by your house? Wanna blind-fold them? And people who don’t like being in the pictures (even though their faces are blurred out)? Going by this standard, you couldnt send a TV camera crew to film anything in the city, either. Those arguments seem contrived and designed to make people paranoid.

In a Tagesschau Poll, people here seem pretty muchdivided on the issue and the press is trying to make it look a bit negative.

I for one think street view rocks and I am happy it is coming to my town.