Posted on Saturday, October 23 2010 @ 13:03 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
While Google Street View is a very cool tool to explore streets and cities, it's a lot more intrusive than aerial imagery and many people don't like seeing their property displayed on the Internet.
The German government forced Google in April 2009 to give people an option to blur pictures of their homes on the Street View service, and since then a total of 244,237 requests have been made to have homes and property obscured.
Since April 2009, German home-owners and tenants have had the chance to write to Google to tell it to blur images of where they live. In August, Google supplemented this with an online tool through which these requests could also be made.
Now the window to make requests has closed, Google said a total of 244,237 requests had been made to have homes and property obscured. This amounted to 2.9% of the 8.5 million households snapped for the German Street View service.
Source: BBC News
