Google scraps German Street View updates
Google has placed the lens cap back on its roving German street camera after deciding that it wasn’t a “business priority” – despite winning a legal battle in the country to continue shooting its street based imagery.
In a statement the search giant said: “Our business priority is to use our Google cars to collect data such as street names and road signs to improve our basic maps for our users in a similar way that other mapping companies do.”
Although existing images will remain on site the famous camera car will remain locked in its garage for the foreseeable future with some reckoning German citizens demands (some 250,000 of them) to have their buildings and not just their faces blurred out could be a contributory factor.
Google’s photographic experiment has proven to be particularly controversial within Europe’s largest economy with prosecutors allege resulted in Google illegally gathering data from Wi-Fi signals, a practice Google claims was inadvertent.