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.

Google started blurring faces in Street View in 2008, and they had been working on it since 2007.

https://maps.googleblog.com/2008/05/street-view-revisits-man...

> These technical issues were overcome

Almost overcome, actually not if precision were a requirement: the blur is over many false positives (especially alphanumeric data on buildings).

A house is not a person. It doesn't have privacy rights.

And there's a big difference in the other interests that have to be balanced against privacy. The only thing you lose by blurring faces or license plates is the ability to track individuals. You can still see a person's clothes and skin color, or the make and model of a car, and do useful research with it.

If you start doing it for homes it becomes a lot harder to track owner neglect, vandalism, squatting, illegally cutting trees, gentrification or changing aesthetic preferences. Even things like counting pools to estimate water usage.

While not in Germany, my dad got a surprise letter from a government agency to explain why he had built a pool in the backyard without getting the proper government approval (which he hadn't built). After some calls it was explained that the agency routinely uses Google Maps to look for surfaces that fit a pattern, and a new sun protection he installed looked like a pool from above.

While mostly harmless and cleared up in the end, this is the very definition of mass surveillance: a government agency looking into people's backyards without judge approval and without oversight. On that principle I have to agree with the 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".

I'm pretty sure that at least 99.99% of property owners won't care about having their garden shown in full detail on Google maps, and the remaining 0.01% of missing data won't move the needle for statistics (assuming that Google will be required to blur the property on explicit request, as it happens now with house facades).

I work in local government doing GIS. You don't use Google aerial imagery, and if you were to do that it would be outside their data sharing terms of service. We personally get other more detailed aerial imagery provided through a public licence agreement specifically for government. There are also much more relevant green space vector datasets that you should be using before using aerial imagery and object classification for any of the tasks you mentioned. Some people in other areas of my local government will use Google maps for some basic tasks, but it is mainly because they don't know what GIS is.

You can still do aerial photography for universities while accepting that some people might want their non-public property to be blurred. It's not mutually exclusive.

Love using Google maps with street/areal view to pre-inspect homes that are for sales, before even seeing them in person. Especially how Immo here take very liberal ways to advertise the properties and the way pictures are taken.

O, those strategic taken pictures that hide the fact there is a large factor next door. Saves me a long drive. O, there is actually a main road / highway next to the property. Shit, a graveyard at not even 20m from the garden. Wait, is that a pig farm next door?!

Even caught a immo that was selling a "single detached haus". But inspected the areal pictures shows its bigger vs the pictures. Its was actually a double house (attached walls) in a inheritance dispute, where they have not even divided the land.

Immo: Come see, come see ... Told the immo to update his false advertisement, he kept refusing and very arrogantly mailing that he did nothing wrong. To this day, its still advertised as a single detached haus.

Hate how many immo are pieces of ** that deliberately take pictures from angles to hide issues, and wast peoples time (and money)! You can discover a LOT of issues when you get good at geolocating + google streetview/arial/3d view.

I hope they do not remove or ban it again in Germany, because its so extreme helpful tool vs the lying ** immo.

I presume he doesn't want the photo at all but restricting access is the compromise.

If he cared he would go after his local authorities.

https://www.geoportal.hessen.de/

I think he should put a large visible artwork in the yard, a blue port inspired creation, and then seek compensation for aerial photography on copyright grounds.

Nice overgeneralization. There is no law which requires to put your name on the door bell, and people are just as mindful about their privacy (or not) as anywhere else in the world.

In Germany it's probably just more likely that your privacy is actually upheld by the law when push comes to shove (especially against privacy-invading companies).

Likely because Google is the one that someone sued