I thought that's because Google stopped doing street view because of German privacy laws. Without the street view cars roaming around there's a lot less street level data to be had.

I'm not sure how important Streetview is for street level data. I was always under the impression that "paved" (or similar) streets were pretty easy to get right (and can possibly be obtained from a governmental agency?). For smaller footpaths I always assumed that they were using movement data (the same they use for traffic forecasting) to detect where they are.

They also resumed Streetview in parts of Germany this year, and I'm not sure they ever fully stopped running them for private data collection.

> I'm not sure how important Streetview is for street level data.

Streetview imagery is mined for address information from signs/plaques on buildings. Operating hours and names of businesses can be determined via OCR

They do feature extraction; store names, addresses, traffic controls, etc.

I figured they had a tracker on the cars that would produce actively captured data that could be compared to phone data to understand what roads are around, etc.