It never was a privacy battle. Germany has the "Panoramafreiheit" (freedom of panorama) defined in https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__59.html, and that allows to do just what Street View does.
This was about Google, and it was at a time where the large German publishers tried to monetize Google Search linking to them (again not caring much about anybody else doing the same kind of indexing and linking), and the Street View frenzy was to a large part a media campaign. My pet theory is that they tried to reign in on the advertising competition.
Nah that's barely scratching the tip of the iceberg.
Likelihood for a shot of a house and one person in front of it, facing the camera, is non-zero.
Could be a passersby or even the person living there leaving their house.
Both don't qualify for "panoramafreiheit", afaik.
Google was just a good exemplary case.
What I'm not sure about is the freedom to photograph buildings per se.
AFAIK, "panoramafreiheit" applies here. But Google just chose to bow to every removal request, since manually checking them would have been to expensive.
Panoramafreiheit also covers picture containing people as long as they aren't the focus or reason of the image, but things get more complicated there (and individual cases could override things). The blurring of people, name plates, license plates and the like (which already existed, that wasn't driven by German concerns) helps a lot in that regard.
Blurring entire buildings was the compromise made specifically for Germany[1], but that was used so much that further bring-up of Street View probably wasn't worth their while. And that was to some degree due to the media frenzy back in the day. I mean, some people actually thought it would be live video of every location! (yes, Germany has its share of tech-illiterate hillbillies, and wow, are they vocal...)
So now Google tries again and crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's and this article has the following to say about this: "In a somewhat transparent attempt to avoid the same issues as in 2010 and 2011, Google is working alongside a German privacy commission this time", as if working with the DPAs is something sinister. "somewhat transparent attempt", really?
You just can't please some people...
[1] Side note: France doesn't have an equivalent to the freedom of panorama, and stuff like the illumination pattern of the Eiffel tower falls under copyright, with cases prosecuted for that. Yet it was pretty much fully visible on Street View from early on.
> Panoramafreiheit also covers picture containing people as long as they aren't the focus or reason of the image, but things get more complicated there (and individual cases could override things).
Panoramafreiheit proper is really just about copyright, people have nothing to do with it. There's a separate law regarding pictures of people, with the aforementioned exception for people that have just incidentally been captured (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/kunsturhg/BJNR000070907.h...).
> What I'm not sure about is the freedom to photograph buildings per se.
> AFAIK, "panoramafreiheit" applies here.
Panoramafreiheit just covers the copyright part, in case any part of the building design is considered a copyrighted work of art. Everything else just falls under the fact that German law knows no "right to pictures of your own property" (unlike the "right to pictures of your own image", which is a part of German law).
Another interesting example is public art exhibitions. Posting photos to social media without a license has been problematic. Search for Hamburg Blue Port as an example.
It is so funny because Germans seem so worried about privacy and they have their last names in the intercoms at plain sight of everyone. More funny even, when you want to buy something on ebay, half of the time they give you their bank account number for you to transfer instead of paypal. I don't get it.
"Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has admitted he was wrong to brand the scandal of lost CDs containing the personal data of millions of Britons a "storm in a teacup" after falling victim to an internet scam.
The outspoken star printed his bank details in a newspaper to try and make the point that his money would be safe and that the spectre of identity theft was a sham.
He also gave instructions on how to find his address on the electoral roll and details about the car he drives.
However, in a rare moment of humility Clarkson has now revealed the stunt backfired and his details were used to set up a £500 direct debit payable from his account to the British Diabetic Association."
A German charity whose operations I know publishes their bank account information pretty much everywhere: on their website, on sides of their car.
It was a bit of a nuisance at times to roll back a few fraudulent transactions but apart from calling up the bank and making it their problem (maybe 1h of life time lost to that, in total), the damage to the charity created by publishing the bank account information has been 0€ in well over 10 years.
Those are regular accounts, neither bank offers some kind of "ingress only" bank account number (that automatically clears to the real account, or something like that), even though that would save _them_ time.
… or the fact that a while ago there had been a brouhaha about WHOIS data for .de-domains, with the result that that WHOIS data is no longer publicly accessible, but at the same time almost all websites are still required to feature a full imprint with address and all – not just commercial websites, but almost all private websites, too…
Likelihood for a shot of a house and one person in front of it, facing the camera, is non-zero.
Could be a passersby or even the person living there leaving their house.
Both don't qualify for "panoramafreiheit", afaik.
Google was just a good exemplary case.
What I'm not sure about is the freedom to photograph buildings per se.
AFAIK, "panoramafreiheit" applies here. But Google just chose to bow to every removal request, since manually checking them would have been to expensive.