I've browsed streetview in the past and they already had it on many rural places for ages, I guess in the west they do the dense cities first though?
Anyway this is hardly an announcement, it's like announcing you will do the second half of the day right after lunch :)

When looking coverage e.g. in Finland, it mostly includes only "country side", since the distances between cities is so big and population density so small. This news probably talks of US?

What comes to privacy, you can think of it like this: If you find a picture that seems infiltrating someones privacy, you should not distribute it. After all, you would not have taken the picture yourself and distributed it in the first place, right?

Google is not effectively distributing *single pictures*, they have countless roads, miles and miles of footage. Sure there are pictures that someone might regard as problematic, but they are lost in the quantity of pictures if they are not distributed.

Regardless of this issue, the pictures are taken in public roads, and surely obeys laws. If some country wants to block Google Street View, they should create law that disallows specific problems. Is the problem in height? Then create law where one is not permitted to take pictures above certain height in roads, etc.

I'm not familiar of why Germans decided to ban Google Street View, but I assume one is still allowed to take pictures in public places... It just doesn't make sense why would the amount of pictures make any difference.

My house and town is now up and in excellent quality. Hooray for zero privacy! lol

They still have a craptacular 2 year old sat image that won't zoom in well still. Google better start hiring people with 4 wheel drive trucks if they want to hit every public road everywhere. Northern Ontario FTW!