14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has decided to pull the plug on its Streetside service in Germany, after receiving numerous complaints on the matter from the local population.
The company launched the street imagery feature on Bing Maps in Europe last year, but it met resistance from people in Germany over privacy concerns.
Microsoft did work with the German data watchdog on this, coming up with a compromise system in which faces and number plates were blurred out, and it also offered users the possibility to complain if they found something of personal importance not pixelated in these photos.
Microsoft received a load of complaints from users unhappy with the manner in which photos were pixelated, it seems, and it has finally decided to take the service down in the country.
However, it seems that this is only a temporary solution, and that the Redmond-based software giant is considering new ways to ensure that the service will return to the country.
"We have learned that there are a limited number of customers in Germany who have raised concerns about their blurring requests," Thomas Baumgärtner, a spokesperson for Microsoft Germany, said in a blog post.
"As we take privacy and data protection of our customers very seriously, we decided to take down the Streetside Beta service in Germany, while evaluating these individual cases and working on a solution."
Google’s own street imagery service, Street View, has attracted a load of complaints from the local population in Germany, but it is still up. However, a large number of building facades in the available photos are blurred, and no new images have been added to the service since April last year.
Apparently, Microsoft has removed the Streetside service from its Bing Maps entirely in Germany, and users there cannot access images outside the country either, ZDNet reports. Streetside imagery from within the country is no longer available for those outside Germany.