Interesting, I don't think I'd mind not having the street view feature. The only reason I use it is to see how foreign countries look like. What are people using it for?
Germany does, in fact have street view. There were delays and pauses, and more places blurred than in most countries but it's available, at least for major cities.
The Street View availability in Europe isn't really accurate from the macro level- if you zoom into central Europe, you'll see that Germany and Austria have very little Street View coverage.
For me it's even worse. Here in Germany they're driving around capturing all data and taking photos but they don't update the StreetView imagery because of that huge blurring debacle back then when they launched StreetView here.
As all Geoguessr players know, official Street View coverage in Germany was extremely limited and all very old. There was a small amount of coverage in around a dozen or so of the largest cities that dated back to the mid-2000s and that's about it. There's also various bits of crowdsourced unofficial coverage in the country which you are perhaps referring to, but it's very limited. Just go to Google Maps, look at Europe, and grab the Street View person, and you'll see.
The fact that Germany banned Street View contributes to it being less useful there, and I theorize that it might indirectly contribute to less data in Germany.
Street View is so amazing, it's a huge game-changer from Google.
Perhaps I am mistaken but wasn't there once a google streetview for Berlin? I'm not 100% sure but I seem to remember looking at it before I moved there, but when I arrived I tried using it and noticed that it was disabled. I believe that this is due to some kind of lawsuit but I don't know for sure.
Google Street view also blurs faces and license plates. What killed it in Germany was that some people wanted to be able to have their houses blurred out, and processing these requests took lots of manual work.
Also, Google currently doesn't really have a presence in China (and, despite some to-and-fro, currently doesn't intend to reenter the market either), so it's probably not that important to them to fix these issues. I wonder if they actively update the map or if it's stuck at some point in the past?
This isn't the first time they have done something like this, Germany was stuck with Street View imagery from 2008 (and limited to larger cities) until some time last year when they decided to finally start updating it again. This was due to some privacy hubbub back when StreetView was introduced that resulted in a law allowing building owners and/or inhabitants to request that their building be blurred on StreetView. Mind you, this law didn't forbid StreetView, but it looks like Google just lost interest, or decided to wait it out...
My city's street view is gone, for one.
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