Google Street View Is Finally in Athens, and It Was Well Worth the Wait

Americans may well be blasé about Google Street View by now, but Europeans are only just catching up. As a result of relatively tight privacy laws in many European countries, the street viewing tool’s introduction has actually been pretty rocky and contentious over here. In Germany, the service was only let in when Google agreed to let residents opt out of having their properties shown. Three percent of Germans did so, the result being that German street views like this one in Berlin have deliberately blurred panels in them.

Meanwhile, in 2009 Greece blocked Google Street View from taking photos at all, refusing to give the go ahead until they were satisfied that Greek privacy was being sufficiently protected. Resistance to Street View stems partly from the country’s not so distant past. Given the country’s traumas with authoritarian rule and dictatorship (which many Greeks believe the United States supported), the idea of an American company logging vast amounts of visual data was seen by many as an Orwellian intrusion.