3% of Germans opt out of Street View

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 21 Oct 2010 at 09:18

Only 3% of Germans have chosen to opt out of Street View, Google has claimed.

The street-level photo mapping system has caused controversy nearly every where it's arrived, with UK villagers even blocking Google's camera car from snapping their village.

Google's Street View woes worsened after it admitted the car was tracking Wi-Fi signals and had picked up private user data along the way.

While the UK's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner, chose not to take action over the data leak, authorities in Germany required Google to let its citizens opt out of having their homes included in Street View.

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," explained Andreas Türk, product manager for Street View Germany, in a post on the Google blog. "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."

Ahead of the launch of Street View in Germany, Google has revealed that it received 244,237 opt-out requests - which works out to 2.89% of the total.

However, Google is still having trouble ensuring all the images are blurred, saying some people didn't submit enough data about which house was theirs.

"Given how complex the process is, there will be some houses that people asked us to blur that will be visible when we launch the imagery in a few weeks time," he said. "We’ve worked very hard to keep the numbers as low as possible but in any system like this there will be mistakes."

Germans will still be able to request the image be blurred after launch by using the "report a problem" tool on the bottom left of Street View images - which UK users can also do if unhappy their home is being featured.