German court calls Google aerial imagery 'spying'
courthousenews.com20 points by rdmuser 2 hours ago
20 points by rdmuser 2 hours ago
Unless I'm mistaken about 20 years ago Germany was the first country that required that Google blur people's faces and licence plates on Gmap's Street View. There was initially much opprobrium about this limitation on free expression. And many technical objections to the scale of the task of identifying all the people and blurring were raised. These technical issues were overcome. It would seem we now accept the anonymity blurring as both not only necessary but an obviously good idea.
Edit: It was 2009.
https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/nearly-3-percent-of-ger...
You're mistaken as the links you provided indicate. They are about blurring peoples houses on Street View as they are seen from public streets. Completely unnecessary and inconsistent with general rule of Panoramafreiheit.
Panoramafreiheit, freedom of panorama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama
"in Germany the permission applies only if the image was taken from public ground, and without any further utilities such as ladders, lifting platforms, airplanes etc.". So the law grants different permissions depending how tall you are.
Mind you, this is copyright law. Might privacy be a separate matter?
I don't have any evidence, but I suspect the number of criminals that rely on aerial imagery to plan heists is negligible. On the other hand, I think most people would deeply regret if universities couldn't monitor foliage for land use/climate studies, archaeologists had to traipse through their land digging holes to do surveys, and local governments couldn't provide a whole range of basic services that depend on commercial imagery services.
This is an awful ruling.
That's probably why they're doing it. Germany is full of coal mines that people protest - imagine if you couldn't know the latest demolished small village.
Germany's also currently ruled by paranoid control freaks, we know this because they already suspended the freedom of information act, also because it "enables spying".