14 DAY TRIAL // Google is marching ahead with Street View Germany plans. For the past few months Germans have been able to ask for the removal of their homes from Street View via an online tool and Google has now finished counting the requests.
The company says that close to 250,000 people asked for their houses to be removed. This is a small percentage of the total number of households Street View will included, Google says, though it still a rather high number.
"Since April 2009, people in Germany have been able to ask for their house to be blurred on Street View ahead of the product being launched," Andreas Türk, Product Manager for Street View in Germany, wrote.
"At first they could ‘opt-out’ by writing us a letter and a few months ago we launched a special online tool to make the process easier," he explained.
"Out of a total of 8,458,084 households we received 244,237 opt-outs, which equals 2.89% of households. Two out of three opt-ots came through our online tool," he added.
While the online tool, which was introduced last summer, proved rather popular, there were a lot of people using the old-fashioned snail mail to ask for their homes to be blurred.
However, Google warns that not all of the houses that should be blurred will be by the time Street View goes live in the country. Given the high number of requests and the complexity of pinning down the location and determining what to blur, the company says there will be errors.
What's more, some of the submissions didn't include the full location data making it impossible for Google to remove the households.
Those that find themselves in this situation can use the regular "report a problem" tool which is normally used to flag inappropriate images. Google also explains that there will be errors like un-blurred people's faces and number plates, inherent to the automated system, and is asking users to report those as well.
Google still hasn't set a launch date for the service, but it should be coming this year. The company also says there are a couple of, presumably, nice surprises for German users of Street View in store.