German court calls Google aerial imagery 'spying' | Hacker News Reader

German court calls Google aerial imagery 'spying'

courthousenews.com

72 pointsrdmuser52 comments

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...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11595495

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?

Could one argue that the top of a car is a ladder?

I agree. With the mount on the roof it's like, what, 3 meters high? The pole is raising the camera way above head height.

https://www.rnd.de/digital/google-erneuert-street-view-kamer...

Ha! Good point. I guess the streetview cameras aren't any taller than the driver, though.

You'd be very wrong, and you can simply go to Google maps and drop the little dude somewhere to confirm that.

> this is copyright law. Might privacy be a separate matter?

It's not immediately clear to me but what is clear to me is that the intent of the law is to protect people that choose to surround their garden with a 3m impenetrable hedge (Tuia is popular for that). The law states you're free to admire the hedge but not free to climb a ladder to peer over it. If the same hedge gets cut down to 150cm, then the law states you're now free to admire the hedge and the garden and whatever you can make out form the house. In that case you may legally take a picture and if the angry house owner comes out jumping at you, well, bad luck for him. If you're carrying a selfie stick, that might change things.

As for Google Streetview cars, I'm normally of the opinion that when dealing with a corporation as big and powerful as this it's better to err on the side of caution and privacy. The blurring of facades tho I found totally unnecessary. Yes, the mount on top of the cars might be construed as a ladder. Also, the law was never written with a company taking photos at this scale in mind. OTOH when you actually use street view it generally does absolutely not look like the images were taken from an excessive height; for the most part I pretty much get to see what I would be able to see in person.

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.

The cases where houses are blurred in Germany are on explicit request by the owner and that owner has privacy rights. Also, why should a company (from the other end of the world no less) have more rights over the property than the owner?

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".

I find it quite ironic. They aren’t nazis in the strictest sense of the definition, but even saying they’re authoritarian is an understatement, and they frequently pull from the same playbook. One cannot even legally criticize or insult politicians in Germany under Section 188, because the qualifier that it must make their job “substantially more difficult” is essentially ignored when it comes to pressuring citizens.

They make it rather clear they hate their constituents, and the German people are starting to realize that.

The strictest definition of a nazi is a member of the NSDAP, which no longer exists. The more useful definition is someone with beliefs that roughly align with the former NSDAP, and they exist all over.

> Germany is full of coal mines that people protest

Note that "full of coal mines" means a total count of 9 in 3 regions with a total area of around 500 km^2, and the protests were pretty much concentrated in one place (the Garzweiler forest), mostly because it is "tradition" there since the early 1980s. The protesters don't seem to care much about any of the other 8 lignite mines that are still in operation ;)

Also interestingly, the area used for open lignite pits for in Germany is about the same as the current area of 'ground installed' solar panels (not really relevant for the discussion but a nice little detail IMHO) :)

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.

What does "immo" mean?

Real estate in German is Immobilie (immobile property), so it will be Immobilien[something]. Um, Immobilienverkäufer for real estate seller? Yes, I think that works.

Probably short for https://www.immobilienscout24.de/ the popular digital marketplace for real estate in Germany.

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.

Academics and governments are buying imagery from the same sources Google is. I've actually just straight up used Google maps for high latitude archaeology when a grant for imagery fell through.

All property is public.

I believe several centuries of legal precedent disagree with that statement, but perhaps I am only imagining things.

Now, one can say that the government owns all of the land and can do with it as it pleases, but that is different from all land being public.

I think you missed the context or intentionally misinterpreted my comment. All real property is publicly viewable from overhead. That has nothing to do with private property rights.

That depends on whether you consider the air to be part of the property or not. When aviation was invented it was a widespread legal and philosophical thought that the owner of property owned the air above the property. "Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad cœlum et ad inferos" - he who owns the soil has from from Heaven to Hell. So pilots would have to get permission from each property owner they wanted to fly over. From that perspective, a satellite or aircraft flying overhead is trespassing. We didn't go that way. Governments legislated and took seizure of the air as common rights of way, and curtailed private property rights when they did so. It's probably better that way. But there's a certain logic to the old ad cœlum definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_est_solum,_eius_est_usqu...

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 absolutely can use Google imagery. Here's the pricing page [0]. I also don't see how other imagery providers wouldn't be similarly effected, unless the issue is specifically with Google publicly distributing this imagery for free.

    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.

It's quite common to use aerial imagery in archaeological remote sensing.

[0] https://developers.google.com/maps/billing-and-pricing/prici...

This is somewhere between ignorant and a bold faced lie. We all know that the permitting people and the finning people have no qualms about using publicly available data to confirm a hunch/tip if the public stuff is more recent than whatever aerial survey is in their "official" GIS system.

Now of course they won't use public imagery to grant permission for anything, but that's a different story.

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.

France?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62717599

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).

>and local governments couldn't provide a whole range of basic services that depend on commercial imagery services.

I understand the efficiency argument but efficiently applying a level of micromanagement that probably shouldn't be happening in the first place exist isn't exactly a win.

Hmm interesting. Are they saying the general accessibility of the platform is what shouldn't be allowed or the photograph itself?

> The judges also determined Google must provide property owners with advance notice when an area is photographed.

But Google's satellite imagery is from a blend of providers like Vantor WorldView, GeoEye, Landsat, etc so....

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.

I am more worried on using my Gemini (and other LLM chat providers) sessions to build my profile and sell it to data brokers.

And I'm much more worried if the government forces these providers to share my data so they can enforce automatically and cheaply the next "save the children" law, which is mostly "no tax sheep left unharvested" law.

(after a short research your LLM usage is currently used to build your profile)

>(after a short research your LLM usage is currently used to build your profile)

I'm hoping and praying that not buying a subscription makes attribution 1% harder (because let's be real here everything is fingerprinted to the moo and back) puts me at the bottom of list of doors to knock on because (like everything else) they'll prioritize easier stuff and political will will be the bottleneck so they'll never get to the bottom of the list.

It's interesting how Germans pretend to value their privacy, and then they put their names on the doorbell :)

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).

A strong social expectation otherwise you might not get your mail. Something that they are more mindful of than perhaps anywhere else.

Maybe no law but the postal service might not deliver mail/packages. The house I live in was previously owned by my grandma. A while after her passing we removed her name from the door. Some time later the mailman rung the door and told us he still got some letters for her from the bank and only because he knew she previously lived there he is giving them to us and if want to receive letters we have to put here name back up...

The rule of German postal service is the following: "Letters from Rundfunkbeitrag and Waldorf Frommer will be delivered every time even it you relocate and change identity. Remaining letters maybe will be delivered".

And they require you to put your address on your website

Next step is to sue the satellite companies for spying and request that they blur your property in the source images before selling them to Google and others.

It's not about spying, imagery, or privacy. If it can be said that a society hates a technology, then Germans hate the internet.

Aerial imagery? We don't do that in Germany!

Why Google? There are many mapping services

Likely because Google is the one that someone sued

Google Maps is by far the most popular (in Germany).

Germany has been a weird country for so long. Haven't lived there in decades and can't see myself fit in at all anymore

The US definitely has much more detailed aerial photographs already. Good luck suing the US government.

I wonder if we're going to get a Streisand Effect this time. Maybe we'll end up with the amusing situation of Google blocking only Germans from seeing their own country, while everyone else still can.

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