This week, Google street view's stealthy little blue car will begin its long journey through Germany’s Straßen, Wege and Pfade, snapping up millions of images for the first time since 2010.
From June 22 to October, Google cars will be touring Germany’s 20 largest cities to upgrade the country’s patchy digital mapping for the first time in over a decade.
Using a 2,9-metre-high camera mounted on the car, Google will take millions of 3D panorama pictures which will be digitally connected and posted on Google Maps from around mid-July.
The car will pass through everywhere from Berlin, Bochum and Bremen to Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Wuppertal, and is scheduled to pass through every region and federal state in Germany.
Google’s specific route remains unknown. “We cannot say when or where exactly we will be, because routes are often changed due to factors like weather, traffic disruptions and the duration of recordings,” a Google spokesperson told die Zeit.
Germany is an outlier in the fact that its street view hasn’t been updated in such a long time. Back in 2010, when the first street images were taken by Google, many politicians, property owners and people concerned with data protection resisted the project.
In total, around a quarter of a million people protested the footage, meaning Google was forced to pixelate images of people’s houses, leading to a rather incomplete street view of the federal republic. Google succumbed to the will of the Germans, and in 2011 announced that it would not update its footage in the country, until now.
Upon the news that the car would be travelling through the country again, Thomas Fuchs, Data Protection Officer in Hamburg, the home of Google’s German headquarters, reminded citizens of their right to object to the images.
Times have moved on since 2010, when everyone was still waiting for YouTube videos to buffer and using iPods. Since tech giants now collect more data on users than ever before, some in Germany may still be concerned about Google publishing images of their homes online.
If you made a request to have your house or flat pixelated on Google street view back in 2010, this request is no longer valid and you will have to make a new one. If you’re organised enough and send off your request by Email or post before the images are published, Google should blur out your home before the shots go online.
If you don’t meet the deadline and the images of your home are published it will still be possible to have them removed. According to Fuchs, users will be able to click a “Report problem” button at each location displayed on maps. Here, they can fill out a form that will be sent to Google for processing and each objection will be looked at personally by Fuchs.
Thumb image credit: Cineberg / Shutterstock.com