ILLEGAL IN GERMANY: Google Street View vs. German Privacy Culture

Have you ever used Google Street View to look around Europe and wondered why Germany is almost entirely blank? For years Google has tried to get Street View into the country, yet has faced heavy public backlash every time. Today we explore why Germany is so anit-Street View, and why Google won't give up the fight while driving in Germany.

Episode 107 | #germany #usa #germanamerican #americaningermany #google #googlestreetview #googlemaps #drivingingermany #driving #maps #mapping #traveleurope #america #livingabroad #datenschutz #dataprotection #privacy #cultureshock #cultureshocks | Filmed April 29th 2023

Jump to Your Favorite Topic:
00:00 Intro
01:28 Why are Germans so Camera Shy?
03:57 "Nie Wieder"
07:21 Datenschutz & Social Media in Germany
10:42 Blurred Lines

Other Videos on Driving in Germany vs. Driving in the USA to check out:

(BAD!!) Driving: Germany vs. USA | The WORST Drivers?

DRIVING IN GERMANY CULTURE SHOCKS | What Surprises Americans

Driving: Germany vs. USA | This Surprised Us!

GEAR IN THIS VIDEO:

DISCLOSURE: The links above may contain affiliate links. This means that, at no cost to you, the Black Forest Family may earn a commission if you click through to make a purchase.

——————————————————

🛵 Our 101 TOP TRAVEL TIPS:

——————————————————

——————————————————

Originally from the Midwest of the USA, we moved to the #blackforest in 2013 and quickly embraced #expatlife. As American expats living in #Germany, things weren't always easy, but we've grown to love our life in Germany. We started this #travelvlog​ to share our experiences with friends and family, and to help those who are interested in moving overseas! Whether you are interested in moving abroad, working abroad, studying abroad, raising a family abroad, or just want to #traveleurope, we're here to give you a first person look at what lies ahead. 😊🎥🌎

[MarkusWitthaut]

German here working in the IT business for a long time. This is a multi-faceted issue:
1. Regarding privacy versus nudity
It is quite a different situation if people can see me nude in public one time only on the beach or make a picture/video that is on record and can easily be shared. So the right to my own image makes a lot of sense to me. It is of course different if I am at an event (concert, sports match, public demonstration) for which it is normal to be recorded.
2. Digitization and privacy
I think you can have both digitization and privacy. The reasons why Germany is so behind is that engineering of physical stuff is much more esteemed that software - you know that part of a computer system you can't kick. So a digital signature is not real and can easily faked and a fax, which is a scan of a physical signature that is transmitted via a telephone line is more realiable than a qualified electronic signature. This is nuts and shows the lack of education of decision/policy makers within public agencies, courts etc. It took covid19 that even instituions like Universities gave up the requirement for paper documents. Or I should better says, they reluctantly started to acknowledge that sending a PDF is the same as faxing. A recent example of this level of incompetence on a managerial level where the botched distribution of the central exam exercises for the Abitur (final exams in German high schools) in the German state NRW.
3. Reluctancy for digital payment
This is a combination of privacy aspects and having control over your spending. With cash it is much harder to find for which products/services someone is spending their money and you have immediate control over your spending. With a look in your purse you can see what you have left to spend. Many germans in generall avoid debt. I think, this might change with younger generations.
+/*+/

[JonathanMandrake]

Honestly, the biggest problem I have with these laws is how little they are enforced. Thinking of cookies and companies like Google, Facebook etc., it's absurd how little violations are punished

[tillneumann]

Four months after the upload of your video, the Google Street View situation in Germany has changed considerably in the meantime. In late spring most photographs that were available (mostly in bigger cities) were still from 2008 and 2009, while recently Google sent out new camera cars around Germany, in most places for the first time since Street View's inception. If you look at the map now, there are still quite large "non--blue" areas, but if they keep going like that, I'd expect those to have vanished within the next few months. The village of 2, 500 population where I live has recently been mapped, so my house can partly be seen on Street View (it's rather tucked away).

Fun fact: In 2009, my law office moved into an 1870s office building in the landmark-protected Speicherstadt in Hamburg. You find that entire building, which has three sections numbered 2, 4 and 6, on numerous images on the Web. However on Street View at the time, the outer thirds of the building could clearly be seen, but the middle part (No. 4) was blurred. I found that strange since Google must have done that at the request of a commercial tenant, not the owner which is the city-owned company that runs most of the port. I found that rather exaggerated even then. But the blur has been gone since they took some new photos in 2017, it seems.l

[DramaQueenMalena]

When people are watched - even if we only think we could be watched - we change our behavior. We conform. This has been verified in many studies.
This is why people in villages come home earlier, wear less individual fashion, go to church, don't talk about politics or opinions, different lifestyles are not that common.
That's why we don't want it. It leads to conformity. And to less freedom and diversity. And to a population that doesn't speak up and fight against injustice.

[BartomiejRyszka-ibvl]

Hi Ashton. You might consider making one on Germanys extremely slow and expensive internet and poor mobile coverage, compared with surrounding European countries and US. Grüße

[skinnyjohnsen]

I saw my own father in a picture on Google street view. He was working in the garden when the Google car passed by. When I told him and gave him the URL, he was quite thrilled about being immortalized on the net. He was only naked from the waist up.

[mogon]

11:35 So that's the "Christian" version of a wet t-shirt contest. Just as sexist as the other type...

Regarding Stretview, there is absolutely no ban or law against Streetview, the title is very misleading here. It was Google, and Google alone, who decided to leave. A quarter million of home owners and residents requested their homes to be blurred. That was more than in other countries, and Google considered the effort to high, hence they stopped it.

Aside from the illegal capturing of WLAN traffic, and of course they brought forward the usual cheap excuse that it was the fault of individual software engineers (just the same BS as with Dieselgate and Brexit-targeting via FB data), the cameras on these cars are way above any fence or hedge and they take pictures of private property and private settings. THAT was one of the most discussed aspects of the whole matter, if not even *the* most discussed one. Let's see what happens when I walk through town with a camera on a pole and take photographs of *everything* that's usually out of sight behind a wall, a fence, or a hedge. I understand your interest in Streetview, but like most things with Google, this is the candy of convenience that leads us onto the stained mattress in the grey van around the corner. Your data is already used by all kinds of companies to rate you. They already analyse your online presence to gain data for your credit score, your insurance rates, your health premium, etc. Mostly without you knowing it. Taking photos over your fence is just the next step. Where do you want to draw a line here?

I think it's a good idea to also put this whole complex a bit more into global perspective. I mentioned FB and Brexit already. The same thing happened with the presidential election of 2016. The amount of data, of *highly* personal data, allowed the propagandist campaigners to target specific groups and even individuals. Without the massive amount of data collected, both Brexit as well as the MAGA campaign would not have succeeded. If that's not a clear sign of how dangerous these data grabbers and the unregulated amassment of information is for our democratic societies, what is?

Americans do not trust their government, but they seem to trust big money companies and data pirates like FB, Google, M$, or Apple. I'd call that pretty schizophrenic, to say the least. How that all works out could be seen in the above mentioned examples. Also, the latest leaks of top-secret files have shown, aside from the severe incompetence in regards to data safety, that the American spy agencies, despite protestations to the contrary, have never stopped spying on partners and allies. And of course, since the euphemistically named patriot act and the erosion of civil rights after 9/11, they can demand any bit of information from any company in their country. That alone should be reason enough for every sane person to avoid leaving any data to any of those companies as much as possible. Now with the advent of AI bots - often illegally - collecting, analysing, and connecting even the smallest shred of personal data, the German and the European data protection laws and the general awareness of data security seem all the more justified.

I can only recommend everybody to think twice before leaving an unnecessary data trace with companies that process data outside of Germany or the EU. Requirements and accountability are simply higher here than there. That's a simple fact. It would be naive to believe that you can live without having a data footprint. But it is possible to make it as small as possible. For instance, use an alternative search engine. I use MetaGer, which works very well and is completely based in Germany. I don't trust them, but I distrust them much less than you know who, and in any case, like with stocks, never put all your data in one single depot. On my phone, I use a degoogled Android, /e/ OS, and it works like a charm, even all my banking apps work, and their default navigation app, Magic Earth, is great. It's the only closed-source application in /e/ OS, no ads, no nagging. So, it's probably a frontend for the NSA. But I don't care if they know where I am as long as they don't know at the same time what I'm searching, or what I pay to whom. The only thing I still use from Google is YT. Break your data into pieces. Don't make it too easy for the grabbers. Don't let THEM play with your identity. That's the point.

A nice weekend to you and your little family, enjoy the nice weather!

[gunnarthegumbootguy]

In Sweden a lot of people don't even know what our cash looks like. I myself have seen some of the new coins and paper bills that was introduced 6 years ago, but I don't remember how they look and have no idea about which coins or bills are which without actually holding them up to read the numbers on them. Credit cards is one part, but i don't think we use that much more credit cards than 25 years ago we already used them very much then, but the difference is apps like Swish were you "swish" money to eachothers cell phones or pay at stores or what ever with your phone. If you buy like something small from a outdoor market or buy a used stuff online from other private persons, you almost always just "swish" the money. Hard cash might be good to have just in case there is a major power outage or war, so having some at home is still a good idea, but of course big convenience store chains have electronic payment registries anyway so they can't even deal with cash payments if power is down... I assume the civil defence preparations demand that they have something to make things work in a long term power outage. Other than that, hard cash is mostly for buying drugs or other illegal stuff, but even that is more and more done online on darknet marketplaces paying with monero (hard to track cryptocoin).

[bragiboddason]

I recently read that many Germans don't want their houses to be seen on Google Street View, but on the other hand, according to Google, Germany is the country where Street View is used the most. I can't quite explain myself why "we" like to be curious ourselves and like to look into "the garden" of our neighbors, but react allergically to the curiosity of others.
That's really a bit strange though.

[chloejacob]

Hi Ashton ! Since I’m partly of German heritage, I really like to watch your videos. I would like to offer an alternative explanation to the fact Germans prefer to pay cash. I heard that it had something to do with the memory of the great inflation of the 1920s and with the fact that Germans are risk averse. What do you think ?

[juyjuka]

@ The T-Shirt thing you mentioned = It made me say out loud WTF!

[achimschroter]

Ihre Beiträge sind so unglaublich gut recherchiert und vorbeitet. Großartig !

[madrooky]

From my humble point of view, the gross perversity of data collection today is less an actual privacy issue, rather than an imbalance in the distribution of profits and participation.
Sounds fancy huh, keep reading it gets better.
And that is "relatively" easy explained. As we already have the means to make opting in or out to share our data optional, the companies who make insane amounts of profits like google, face book and many more lesser known companies, still live off the participation of willing or simply "wilfully ignorant" consumers, and in turn, they often get personalized and to the teeth tailored ads presented just to milk the cow a little more. And that also has lead us in a situation where profit margins of social media much more rely on "attention management" and the resulting focus targeting emotions rather than qualitative content.
I will admit that, without a doubt the ad sponsored media economy has some pretty nice benefits for independent artists and content producers. But lets be honest, the "watering" or "over saturation" this market with trash or even harmful content is more than obvious. FFS in less wealthy countries social media has become an imminent threat for fragile democracies.

Ok, that might be a little less "easy" explainable as stated above for people who are not so familiar with these topics.
But its totally clear to me, in the wake of the current boom of machine learning instruments the cracks in mentioned economies and other areas will burst wide open pretty soon. I got GPT4 running on my computer with an uncensored LLM and that stuff is equally fascinating as dangerous. And these LLM's are culminations of online collected data sets.
Just over the last weeks and months numerous different AI research groups have unveiled that the technology is on a level to "auto correct" itself if properly guided. And i can attest to that, i had chat conversations with my PC over the last week that simply blew me away.
Now, you might think "naah what should a bot that can talk do?", then i encourage you to look up "AutoGPT" a simple tool to enable such a chatbot that can run on a decent PC, accessing the functionality of a PC and internet and "prompt itself" to complete all kinds of tasks in minutes, that normally require teams of highly qualified people working months on it.
Yes it is still pretty unstable/unreliable right now, but we have the first tweets that have been created by a task that looked as simple as "help me to gain world domination" and bullshit like that^^

And all together, the aspects of economics and data protection that are about in some form to shift nobody can predict, build largely on a "laissez-fair" attitude in regards to data protection in general. Otherwise these markets from AI research to social media would simply not profitable enough to grow as rapidly as they did.

Mahlzeit 😁🖖

[Why-D]

According to my privacy I will not answer the question public.

[patrickhanft]

this is difficult. I'm not sure, if this video really does justice to all the different aspects of privacy discussions here in Germany. I participated in the "Verfassungsbeschwerde" of 2007 against the "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" (the first data retention) together with around 25.000 other people and yet I thought most of the discussion around Google Street View to be absolutely stupid. For me there was no real reason in why Google should not be allowed to take pictures of public space and make it publicly available.

I assume, this discussion became big then, because especially more wealthy people might have thought, that the easy access to pictures of their properties might not only have effects on their felt "personal environment", but also might have effects on property evaluation and stuff like that. And while I understand that it might have felt like some kind of intrusion, I never thought photographing public stuff would be one. But to be honest: Now, over a decade later and with all the potential to aggregate meta information about a neighborhood from raw image data using machine learning and stuff like that, I might admit, that technology like that also can have an impact on personal data than I initially thought, because it opens up potential for data driven discrimination, which is the ACTUAL issue with not protecting personal data. However, on the other hand, when Apple took pictures for their service, there was no discussion at all anymore. In this respect, the German population also became somewhat mellow.

The idea behind the issue with companies collecting data goes something like this: Processing personal data by big companies is something we would call creepy many times, when it would be done by people. Therefore the idea of letting big companies create "value" from "our" data is not only absurd but actually a kind of "theft", as there is usually no financial compensation of this data. And it is not theirs, just because they collect it, but it is ours, because it is information about us. But the actual issue is not that companies collect data. It is that companies would use this data against us and not only provide us a "great advertising experience" because we get ads "tailored to our interests" or content like this. But companies will use the data to discriminate access to their services or let us pay more just because of we might live in a neighborhood where there happens to be more often a payment default.

But this discussion is something different than the discussion on what information the government should be allowed to collect. In your video it sounds like we Germans are traumatized by authoritarian regimes. Well, the lesson we learned (but are also starting to forget too often for my liking) is, that these regimes can emerge any time and democracy alone is no protection against that. Hitler was elected and abused loopholes in the Weimarer constitution not protecting the state enough against enemies of democracy. And the reason why we cannot trust the state, in particular, to access personal data is that it was the collection of personal data, including religious affiliation, that ensured that, in the Netherlands in particular, the murder of Jews could take place so much more quickly and brutally than elsewhere. Yes, that might make not make too big of a difference today, when in an authoritarian regime a government just could buy access to data collected by companies like Cambridge Analytica or maybe not even an authoritarian regime yet, but just authoritarian candidates that would try to gather power to attack democratic institutions … don't know where this idea just came from.

In the end, yes it is important to discuss these topics, but to be honest, as well researched – as always – your video was. This time I got the feeling, that it has been cramped by too many similar yet different ideas around this general topic and does not do any of these topics enough justice, so it can really be understood. But – and this is my disclaimer – this time you hit a field with which I am (slightly) involved for almost 20 years now.

[karinland]

Germans don’t have to use credit cards to collect a credit score. So we don use credit cards. But we du use debit cards for 90% of perchases over 10€. I feel guilty when paying 1, 34€ at the bakery with my debit card because the fees are anulling the profit

[Luredreier]

The American model?
Never.
But some middle ground?
Perhaps.

[jsimpso]

Remember what GDPR is short for: German Data Protection Regulation

[CaroAbebe]

It says much about a culture if small children running around in a public area is considered a no go.

[Michael-qnjs]

Die Digitalisierung ist prima, es gibt nur einen Haken:
Alles läuft nur mit Elektrizität.