Google’s camera cars are back in Germany, but not for Street View update

Google has sent its camera-equipped cars back onto the road in Germany. Since 2011, these Street View cars no longer drove around the eastern neighbors. However, the new images will not be used to update the outdated Street View portion of Maps in Germany.

Google has informed the German news site T-online, part of Deutsche Telekom, that it has sent its camera cars back on the road in Germany, although the company has not said how many cars are involved and where exactly they are driving. . Until November they will be driving around Germany.

Google is also making new images again. These are not used to refresh the view in Street View, but to improve your own maps. The German rendering of Street View often contains very outdated street images. Google Maps in Street View, for example, shows employees of the Google office on Hamburg’s ABC-Straße waving at a Street View car passing by. That happened in 2008 and since then these images have not been updated. In Germany, only the 20 largest cities were photographed with the cars, which means that large parts of Germany as a whole are not visible in Street View view.

This is related to a decision by Google in April 2011. The company then announced that it would no longer update the Street View images. From that moment on, Google decided to only use the cars and the camera images to improve the Maps maps, for example by mapping the street names and traffic signs. According to Google, this 2011 decision was not a change of policy; the company referred to a message from January 2011 in which it already announced that it wanted to focus on improving the maps.

This issue is partly about privacy concerns. Google reached a compromise with German privacy watchdogs in March 2010, offering an opt-out to Germans. With this they could, as it were, unsubscribe from the service, making their houses unrecognizable. A total of 244,000 homeowners have made use of it. In 2011, however, it turned out that Google was not obliged to do so. A higher German court ruled that Google in principle has the right to take pictures of houses from the public road, unless the camera trucks photograph specific apartments or photograph over private fences.

In light of this ruling, German media rights lawyer Kay Wagner argues that Google is “holding on to a legal situation that does not exist.” He emphasizes that there is therefore no legal obligation to make German houses unrecognizable in Street View on request. Despite the ruling in 2011, Google still insists on not updating the German images.

Google came under fire in several European countries in 2010 when it became known that the company was collecting SSIDs from Wi-Fi networks with the photography cars. Data that was sent via those networks was also stored.