In Germany, Google allowed residents to request that their homes be blurred in any Street View images. Nearly 250,000 households made opt-out requests in 2009–2010, requiring Google to hire 200 temporary programmers to meet the demand. Google was fined 145,000 euros by the Hamburg data-protection supervisor who had first discovered the Street View illicit data gathering, just short of the 150,000 euro fee he could have imposed. It was the largest fine ever to have been levied by European regulators for privacy concerns.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 467