Google’s plan to offer Street View photo mapping in Germany, which has bumped up against the country’s strict privacy laws, has come in for renewed criticism after regulators learned that the company, a search engine giant, was also archiving the locations of household wireless networks.Google’s Street View technology has been accepted in countries like Britain and France, but has encountered greater resistance in Germany and Switzerland, where data privacy laws are stricter than in the rest of Europe or in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/technology/30google.html