![]() Google now has Street View images only for big cities in Germany, like Berlin and Frankfurt, and appears to have given up on the rest of the country completely. Privacy has been a particular issue in Germany, where many people objected to the roll-out of Street View. In extreme cases, whole countries are affected. It's hard to be sure about the causes, though, since Google isn't talking. If you approach the edge of gap on a residential street, you can often zoom in and see a house in the missing section that's been blurred out. In some cases, those blurring requests may have caused some of gaps in Street View. But a lot of regular folk have asked to have their homes removed too, judging by the prevalence of blurred images in residential areas. There's a gap in the Street View imagery outside Mark Zuckerberg's house in Palo Alto, for instance, although his home was visible in the past. Google explains on its Maps privacy page how to request this, and it's a relatively simple process.įamous people often file such requests. One possible culprit is that people have asked to have their homes blurred for privacy reasons. The gaps aren't big, and it's possible to overlook them at first glance, but once you're aware they exist, they seem to appear all over the place. The pattern is similar in Tokyo, London, Berlin and many other cities around the world. In other cases, a Street View driver might have skipped a street by accident, or the camera or recording software might have malfunctioned.īut Google often revisits towns to update its imagery, and it's hard to see why the Sunset residential district in San Francisco, for example - more or less in Google's back yard - would have so many gaps. ![]() A wide swathe of Hunters Point in San Francisco is missing, for example, but the images of adjacent streets show a lot of construction was going on. In some cases, construction work may have prevented its mapping car from passing through. There could be many reasons for the gaps, as Google has discussed in the past. Harder to fathom is where sections of streets are missing, signified by gaps in the blue lines that appear when you click on the yellow Street View icon in Google Maps. One is where a building has been blurred, which poses little problem for Street View explorers and is almost certainly due to a privacy request. There are two types of gaps, broadly speaking. "We've so far prioritized refresh of the bulk of the Street View imagery for our users, and we are certainly also working to fill these occasional gaps." "In places where we collected very early Street View imagery, the old data may sometimes cause an issue that prevents new images from surfacing," the company said via email. But it refused to answer questions beyond that, including whether privacy requests are a factor, and whether the gaps are becoming more frequent. Google called the gaps a "known issue" and implied it's due partly to a glitch in its early mapping software.
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