Google says hardly any Germans opt out of Street View Google has said that just 2.89 per cent of German households have asked for their homes to be taken off Street View - but sadly it will not be able to oblige all of them when it launches in the country next month. Street View has unaccountably gotten up the noses of privacy groups, householders and random street drunks …
So we could find out roughly how many people opted out.
As it is, we can just speculate. How about:
81000000 inhabitants / 34000000 households with a TV (according to Wikipedia) * 244237 = 581858 people have opted out.
But Google juggernaut will carry on regardless.
I actually don't see a problem with this.
How is it different from walking down the street yourself?
As long as they don't take WIFI info then does it really matter if someone photographed the outside of your house?
Satellite imaging is far more intrusive, especially how Labour in the UK tried to use it to increase rents on council properties.
Yet hardly anyone complains as much about that as they do about Google Earth.
Will Microsoft's Streetview cause the same complaints?
What sounds smaller... < 3% or 581,858?
Or rather 97+% of the people *didn't* opt-out.
That's spin for you. :-(
The truth is that Google made the promise to honor the opt-out request, however they cite reasons why they can't comply and would rather not honor their promise for their own commercial gain.
'Do no evil' ? I guess the expression 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' is also true if you replace the word Beauty with evil. Then in Google's mind, they are truly not evil.
in 2007 there were approx 40 million households
http://www.destatis.de/jetspeed/portal/cms/Sites/destatis/Internet/EN/press/pr/2007/10/PE07__402__12421,templateId=renderPrint.psml
so over a million households opted out.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=2.89%25+of+40+million&btnG=Search
(Delicious irony)
I find it hard to believe that is "Hardly any"
Living in the US and enjoying the actual BENEFITS of both, Streetview AND WiFi based navigation/triangulation, i must say - congratulations to my home country for missing out on another great innovation.
Since the local folks can't get their act together (anyone remember the "Falk Plan" Stadt plan? it's like a 2-d version of a Rubics Cube) now they make it hard for Google to come in and offer the service for FREE.
But then again, this is the same country which in the 90es sued people for scanning phone books to produce a telephone number registry.
Oh well, i guess this whole internet thing is a fad, and is going away soon ....
... Call me up when you're joining the rest of us in the 21st century, and maybe i come back for a visit again...
When someone puts up an 8 ft fence in front of their property, it usually means they want some privacy from casual passers-by. Why is Google taking pictures with a 10 to 12 foot tall camera, if not to deliberately bypass this type of privacy?
In some countries, it's "normal" to have bylaws that limit fences to 4 or 6 ft in front of properties. But countries like Japan and, I believe, Germany have no such generally accepted height limits for privacy screening.
"Google says hardly any Germans opt out of Street View
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Says (nearly) all opt-outs accommodated
By Joe Fay • Get more from this author
Posted in Law, 21st October 2010 13:21 GMT
Google has said that just 2.89 per cent of German households have asked for their homes to be taken off Street View - but sadly it will not be able to oblige all of them when it launches in the country next month.
Street View has unaccountably gotten up the noses of privacy groups, householders and random street drunks worldwide since it launched.
However, few countries have been as problematic for Google's all-seeing Astras/Opels as Germany, which much to the ad-broker's apparent surprise has some kind of bizarre cultural aversion to anything that smacks of surveillance."
what are you talking about, dont you/ad-broker's remember their history ?
"much to the ad-broker's apparent surprise has some kind of [b]bizarre cultural aversion[/b] to anything that smacks of surveillance."
dont you remember the original IBM database and paper files listings of ALL so called harmless lists of ALL jewish residents and their locations and associations , the party you least expect will be SO happy that goole etal , the other DPI vendor;s and marketeers are collecting all this interesting data, thats why i find this so odd that google state hardly any Germans opt out
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