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There’s currently quite a lot of hubbub going on in the German mainstream media. No, it is not about our stupid politicians messing up all kinds of things. It is about Google’s announcement that they’re finally going to enhance the German part of their world map with Street View imagery.
At last! Something to be upset about! Something that will make everyone angry! Google, the embodiment of evil, the company that makes gazillions of dollars by spying on everyone, goes one step further in their crusade against our privacy, showing our homes to the entire world! Finally something to fill the newspapers with during the silly season!
Wait … do they really invade our privacy? Actually, they just drive their cars around on public roads and streets and take photos of what everyone can see whenever they want (well, unless they are blind or cannot afford traveling to that place). So what is the problem really?
It might be helpful to know a bit about the German printed media’s relationship with Google. Until recently, media corporations (newspaper publishers, broadcasting networks, etc.) were in a comfortable oligopoly position: They owned the expensive infrastructure (printing machines and broadcast stations) that was needed to reach the masses, so anyone wanting to inform many people about their awesome products had to pay the publishers to run ads. Over the decades, the publishers had gradually optimized their business model by adjusting (i.e. reducing) editorial expenses just so far that not too many people would turn away from them. Then the Internet came into play, enabling everyone to share their ideas, and the publishers ignored it. Then the Internet became more and more important, and the publishers embraced it with their traditional business model—publishing stuff and putting ads alongside—ignoring that the Internet actually is not just another one-way mass medium. Then Google figured out a better way of doing paid advertising online, and everyone was happy: Advertisers had much better return on investment (and control over it), users were shown ads for products that actually interested them, and Google quickly became the market leader of Web advertising. Well, except that the previous owners of the advertising game were pissed because their profits stopped growing (and sometimes even declined).
Instead of trying to devise a clever new business model of their own, they are now blaming everything on Google and calling them copyright violators because of the Google News service which aggregates news articles from different sources (and refers users to the original article on the publisher’s web site if they want to see the full story). They claim that their headlines and teasers are very expensive to make and that Google infringes their copyright by using these to make gazillions of ad dollars by displaying tons of ads next to them on Google News. (You might want to have a quick glance at the Google News site to verify this claim.) Basically, they are not happy with Google giving them viewers for free—in addition, they want politicians to pass a law forcing Google to give them some of their gazillions on top. (They could of course simply block Google News from their sites by extremely simple means but this is obviously not what they want.)
The problem with this publishers vs. Google war is that the publishers do have quite some control over what their journalists (and “journalists”) write, and they happily use this to influence the people’s opinion on Google claiming that they are evil crooks disrespecting any kind of privacy and never even trying to take their “don’t be evil” claim seriously. Unfortunately, they do have some success with this strategy so far—many people still have no idea about what Google really is or does, so they’ll just believe everything the newspapers write. Even when a shitty local rag like the TZ claims that Google knows everyone’s apartments and makes extremely detailed photos of them public to everyone in the world.
(In fact these publishers—and a disturbingly growing number of politicians—want to abolish the Panoramafreiheit or at least exclude Google from using it. The fact that journalism would be almost impossible without it obviously does not matter—or not occur—to them.)
And while spreading this deceptive privacy FUD, they are running another story the same day about CCTV surveillance in the public open space. Recently the CCTV cameras around a place near the Munich East railway station were removed because the number of delicts had significantly diminished and we have some kind of law saying that surveillance cameras should only be placed where they are needed due to high crime rates. Their story describes the wonderful peace that has finally come to Sendlinger-Tor-Platz with the advent of CCTV cameras (citing a fruit seller who is happy that the junkies have gone, and saying that tourists, young mothers, and retirees have returned), and in the nex paragraphs it describes how the same kind of peace has disappeared from Orleansplatz together with the cameras (this time citing a flower seller who complains about new vulgar behavior).
So, according to them, privacy is absolutely essential when it might help impeding Google (and even though Google actually goes the extra mile to protect privacy by not only restricting themselves to public streets but also removing faces and number plates from their photos), but not even worth a single mention when it is about keeping everybody under surveillance so that they behave neatly.
A question to the psychologists among you: Does this qualify as schizophrenia?
Sendlinger Tor (Sendling Gate) is one of Munich's three remaining city gates from the early 14th century, part of it's medieval fortifications.
Lederhosen am Sendlinger Tor
A little shop with leather shorts just behind the Sendlinger Tor in Munich.
Munich subway station Sendlinger Tor (opened 1980-10-18) crowded with people during Monday evening rushhour.
Subway again today :) made a selfie with my lovely coworker Katrin! Snowed today in Munich and it was quite cold. Work is OK. One day left till the fair opens on Monday.
Das AIDS-Memorial in München ist eine blaue Säule, die 2001 am Sendlinger Tor errichtet wurde. Der Gestalter dieser Säule ist Wolfgang Tillmans, der mit seinem Entwurf einen Wettbewerb der Stadt zur Gestaltung eines Aids-Denkmals gewann. Dabei bildete er die Stele Säulen aus der nahegelegenen U-Bahn-Station Sendlinger Tor nach.
Das Denkmal trägt folgende Inschrift:
AIDS
den Toten
den Infizierten
ihren Freunden
ihren Familien
1981 bis heute