> They've been uploaded by some third party. No one cared in the slightest. I don't understand why this is news now.

Not saying it's right or wrong but there is a big difference between some random people uploading photos every now and then VS a huge conglomerate with huge resources repeatedly mapping everything with 360 photos. I can understand why one might make the news and the other doesn't.

It's not random people, it's some company that does it: https://www.rolling-rotors.de/

It's done at scale, not a random regular picture here and there. It's all 360 and almost indistinguishable from Google's material. You can only tell by the car and the logo on its roof, which hasn't been cropped out unlike Google's pictures.

As all Geoguessr players know, official Street View coverage in Germany was extremely limited and all very old. There was a small amount of coverage in around a dozen or so of the largest cities that dated back to the mid-2000s and that's about it. There's also various bits of crowdsourced unofficial coverage in the country which you are perhaps referring to, but it's very limited. Just go to Google Maps, look at Europe, and grab the Street View person, and you'll see.

Anecdotally, in Berlin almost all street view pics are from 2008. It's actually kinda nice to take a tour of the past that way sometimes!

Google Maps has a function to view older panoramas - "See more dates" button at the top left.

It looks like that feature is going to be pretty limited in Germany. From the article:

"Google is working closely with a German government privacy agency, ensuring that its imagery meets the country’s data privacy regulations. Among them is a requirement to delete older images, which means that you won’t be able to use Street View to travel as far back in time in Germany as in other countries once the new imagery is live."

Historians 200 years from now are going to curse our name.

That kind of data should definitely preserved for future generations - national libraries and archives could be trustworthy guardians of such data that is only meant to be accessed again with some time delay.

Or we encrypt it very well, throw away the key, and wait for computation to catch up :)