Aug 21, 2010 10:05 GMT  ·  By

Google's troubles in Germany are well known and they center mostly around Street View. The feature is about to go live in the country, later this year, but, due to concerns, Google has allowed individuals to request the removal of their houses from Street View, a first for the company.

Now, a German photographer wants to photograph all of those removed buildings and add them himself to the Google mapping service, via Picasa.

Basically, he, along with others that share his views, will go around and photograph the houses and buildings that will be blurred in Google Street View Germany.

Then, he will upload those photos, along with the geolocation data for them, to Picasa, Google's photo sharing service, and, finally, link them to the actual location in Street View.

Street View, along with the images captured by the Google cars and trikes, also features user photos to offer an alternative or a higher-quality view of locations.

These geo-tagged photos come from Picasa, Panoramio and Flickr. The feature adds a new dimension to Street View and, so far, there have been no complaints about it.

Using this system, the German photographer, Jens Best, wants to make photos of all of the blurred locations available in Street View.

Because of privacy concerns and vocal critics in the country, Google will allow anyone to request that their house be blurred in Street View images. It is under no legal obligation to do so, even in Germany.

What the photographer wants to underline is how ridiculous the fears are. It is completely legal to photograph locations from public space and it is hardly a violation of privacy.

What's more, photos of many of the locations are very likely already online. The photographer wants the same rules that apply in real life to apply on the web.

Since Street View hasn't launched yet, he can't really do anything yet as there is no way to know what locations will be blurred. However, he has already enlisted the help of a couple of hundred people with the same mindset.