14 DAY TRIAL // Google Street View is now finally widely available in Germany in all 20 cities that the first wave included. Street View has been met with more resistance in Germany than in every other country, partly because the country as a whole is more concerned about privacy, partly because the matter has been more publicized than in other places.
Street View is now available in all the places Google shot so far, along with the blurred houses of those that wanted to opt-out. As expected, the latest move has been met with even more controversy.
"I’m pleased to let you know that you can explore even more of Germany because we’ve just released 360-degree, street level imagery of Germany’s 20 largest cities, including Berlin, Hamburg, my home town of Munich and more," Andreas Tuerk, Product Manager at Google, announced.
"If you haven’t yet been to Germany, or if you simply want to refresh your memory from a previous visit, here are some places that might be fun to explore. These panoramic images that virtually transport you without the hassle of a plane ticket are now accessible directly from Google Maps," he said.
Everyone around the world can now check out the famous landmarks or the places they visited in their travels in some of the largest cities in Germany.
For the locals, the attraction may be seeing their house online or where their friends live. Then again, for some that may actually be the worst thing about Street View.
Germany is the first place where Google has enabled users to have their houses blurred in advance of the service going live. Close to 250,000 people chose to go this route but that's only about three percent of the households in the areas, Google says.
This may not be enough to appease everyone though. As expected, with so many houses to blur, there have been errors and some houses may still be visible from certain angles or may not have been blurred at all.
Google warned this may happen and asks those that do spot an error to click on the "Report a problem" link. Still, this approach, launch first, fix later, may not be well received by some people so we'll have to see how all this plays out, whether the Germans get comfortable with the idea of Street View or this comes back to hurt Google.