German Guy Wants to Photograph Those Buildings People Want to Exclude from Google Street View
Spiegel reports that German photographer and IT consultant Jens Best wants to personally take snapshots of all those (German) buildings which people asked Google Street View to remove.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has spent years calibrating Street View against European privacy objections, including work on anonymizing faces and plates announced back in 2007. In Germany the friction has taken a specific form: residents are formally requesting that their buildings be excluded before the service launches there.
Spiegel reports that photographer and IT consultant Jens Best plans to photograph exactly those buildings himself. His project turns Google's opt-out ledger — a list meant to shield homes from publication — into his own shooting script.
First-order effects
- German homeowners who filed exclusion requests with Google face re-exposure through Best's independent photos, which no Google opt-out can remove.
- Google's German opt-out mechanism comes under fresh scrutiny: it controls what Street View publishes, but not what anyone else with a camera publishes about the same addresses.
Second-order effects
- If Spiegel's audience follows Best's lead, the opt-out list becomes editorial material for other photographers and outlets, multiplying the exposure the requests were filed to prevent.
- The stunt lands mid-rollout pressure on Google in Germany, where each privacy flashpoint raises the political cost of the service's launch there.
Third-order effects
- The episode exposes a structural limit of platform-level opt-outs: once exclusion requests exist as data, visibility migrates from the platform's control to whoever republishes the list, so opting out may trade one form of exposure for another.
- For mapping services entering privacy-sensitive markets, exclusion systems may need to be designed as confidential processes rather than publishable registries, or they invite exactly this kind of counter-publication.
The trend: As mapping platforms institutionalize opt-outs, individual publishers can route around them, shifting the privacy battleground from what platforms show to what anyone can shoot and post.