Approximately 244,000 of the 8.4 million German households photographed by Google's Street View cameras have opted out of having their residences included in the mapping product's results.
That amounts to 2.89 percent of the homes Google has photographed for Street View, a mapping feature that offers up 360-degree, street-level photographs of major cities throughout the world.
"Out of a total of 8,458,084 households we received 244,237 opt-outs, which equals 2.89 percent of households. Two out of three opt-ots came through our online tool," Andreas Turk, product manager for Google Street View in Germany, wrote in a blog post.
The stats come about two months after Google announced plans to extend Street View to 20 German cities by year's end, including Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremburg, and Düsseldorf. For those who did not want photos of their homes included in Street View, Google gave people until Sept. 15 to notify the company via google.de/streetview.
German regulators, however, complained that Google did not give people enough notice. The announcement came in mid-August, a month when many Europeans are away on holiday. A deadline "must be carefully prepared, coordinated, and announced," John Caspar, Hamburg's commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, said at the time.
In response, Google said processing opt-out requests and applying blurring is a complex task that takes time; those who missed the deadline can still ask to have their homes removed via the "report a problem" button, Google said.
"Given how complex the process is, there will be some houses that people asked us to blur that will be visible when we launch the imagery in a few weeks time," Turk wrote. "We've worked very hard to keep the numbers as low as possible but in any system like this there will be mistakes."
Some people, for example, asked Google to blur their house but neglected to provide a precise location. They will have to use the "report a problem" function. "The same is true of faces and car licence plates that our automatic blurring technology may have missed," he said.
Germans have actually been able to opt-out of being included in Street View since April 2009, Turk said Thursday, though until recently, they had to do so by writing Google a physical letter.
"We worked closely with the Data Protection Authorities to ensure all the right German privacy standards were met," Turk said.
In September, the Czech Republic banned Google from expanding Street View beyond Prague, citing privacy concerns. Several days later, Google announced that Street View is now available on all seven continents with the addition of Brazil, Antarctica, and Ireland.