German vandals target Street View opt-out homes

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11827862

by earnubs • 16 years ago

31 47 16 years ago

bbc.co.uk

_grrr8• 16 years ago

I've opted out from street-view, asking both my flat, and my car to be removed, Google obliged. No eggs yet.

griftah3• 16 years ago

Why?

_grrr8• 16 years ago

Why did I opt out? I'm not on Twitterbook, and try to share as little personal (non work related) information on-line as I can (although there's probably more out there than I'd like). It's my 'default mode' to be cautious when sharing data, I may be over-cautious but I still think it's my right to be. There only seems to be upside for Google, and potential downside for me, in having my property on their site.

SZW2• 16 years ago

The eggs are the exception, I think. With 250k people having opted out, and the article speaking of 'some homes in Essen'... it probably were some youths high on googlemania - a local thing. Though I suppose others may follow - copycats.

JustinSeriously• 16 years ago

"some youths high on googlemania - a local thing"

Is this really a thing in Germany? That's the weirdest part of this whole story, that kids would care that much about an international corporation like Google. It'd be like getting in a fight with someone because they didn't drink Coke.

eru4• 16 years ago

The picture displays typical German life.

SZW2• 16 years ago

Haha, totally. I don't know - I think it's kind of sad. Rural Bavarian life is taken for life in Germany in general... it's plain wrong. I should know, because I live in Germany. I wonder why everyone keeps going back to restricting Germany to that single cliche.

eru4• 16 years ago

Because the other cliché is even less political correct.

(And I am German, but don't live there any longer.)

riffraff• 16 years ago

The southern part of a european country is usually the stereotype of the larger nation.

When thinking of the UK the stereotype is the english banker more than the scottish clansmen, for spain is the mediterranean south insted of the atlantic/mountainous north, for italy it's the more noisy&caoithic rome/naples/sicily instead of the mitteleuropeans & industrial milan and turin.

I have no explanation for this though except some pseudohistorical ramblings.

Tichy5• 16 years ago

Strange enough, I passed an Alphorn concert in a Berlin park the other day. Berlin is very far away from the Alps.

ugh4• 16 years ago

That photo was taken in the small bavarian village Oberstaufen (pop. 7,000). Their marketing people invited Google (and baked cake for them [0]) when the debate about Street View was heating up in Germany. As a consequence Oberstaufen was the only town or village you could visit on Google Street View two weeks before the service launched with all the major cities. Suffice it to say, Oberstaufen received tons of free media coverage because of that.

I think that’s a pretty genius move of the marketing people in a small village in a tourism region.

[0] http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/11/special-preview-o...

eru4• 16 years ago

Thanks! I did not know that. It's a brilliant move.

thetable• 16 years ago

The other kind of vandalism has happened too, where houses were requested to be taken down / pixelated by someone other than the owner or tenants. There was a news report about this happening to the Green party headquarters last week, and according to Google, it couldn't be undone because Google had deleted the data (imagine that).

ugh4• 16 years ago

Completely deleting the photos of houses people requested to be blurred was one of the requirements of the government. (It’s not a law but a voluntary agreement. The government did, however, threaten to regulate services like Street View. That’s probably not going to happen now.)

Tichy5• 16 years ago

I must admit that I would find it amusing as a street art project to pixelate some of those houses for real, with some kind of graffiti perhaps. Or like the artist Christo who wraps things into garments (including the German Reichstag).

I find the pixelated buildings really annoying. Luckily mine isn't pixelated yet, but I am sure it is only a matter of time. My street already has 5 pixelated buildings.

pbhjpbhj4• 16 years ago

>I would find it amusing as a street art project to pixelate some of those houses for real,

That would be fantastic, I'm thinking, having large pixels on a fuzzy material, varying colours matched to the surrounding buildings but at different depths to avoid anyone getting a focussed image of the whole building? Any ideas on materials? At first I thought frosted perspex, but I'm more drawn to fabric that can be fuzzy round the edges too.

phreeza• 16 years ago

I didn't think very much of it at the time these requests were made, but now that I have seen the effect, pixelating these houses seems like an act of vandalism in itself to me.

Imagine 50 or so years from now, these recordings will be a wonderful document of our times, but in Germany they are now heavily scarred.

ugh4• 16 years ago

But don’t you know that creating historical documents is not the task of filthy profit-oriented corporations but of the pure German government?

Tichy5• 16 years ago

Touche - I guess the EU will soon invest a Trillion dollars into their own streetview project, which will unfortunately never go anywhere (what has happened to the EU financed Google killer?).

Luc• 16 years ago

How so? The source material is no doubt still available in unpixelated form.

macco• 16 years ago

According to google, it is not.

_stephan• 16 years ago

No, the German data protection officials insisted on Google blurring the original source material and not preserving any unblurred copies.

IMHO, that might be appropriate in certain exceptional circumstances, e.g. when inadvertently something very private or embarrassing has been captured, but it is a bit over the top as a general policy.

wolfgke• 16 years ago

I live in Germany and eyed the whole process of Google Street View.

The whole thing with the opt-out is more considered to be a conflict of generations, so don't take this too seriously.

The problem is a different one: if in one apartment building only one rentee opts out the whole apartment building becomes blurred. This is what caused a lot of hate by rentees who want the house to be seen in Street View.

Another action that occured (only in German, sorry, but I'll try to translate roughly):

http://asset.soup.io/asset/1253/8519_985c.jpeg

Someone put a note saying that because some rentee saw his private sphere violated by Google Street View he won't accept packages for his neighbours anymore since this is also a violation of private sphere. Additionally he blurred his signature for security reasons (because of the often quoted argument that showing the house in Google Street View causes safety concerns).

German vandals target Street View opt-out homes

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