It never was a privacy battle. Germany has the "Panoramafreiheit" (freedom of panorama) defined in <a href="https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__59.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__59.html</a>, and that allows to do just what Street View does.<p>Other services offer very similar images (e.g. <a href="https://www.mapillary.com/app/?pKey=305780994287217" rel="nofollow">https://www.mapillary.com/app/?pKey=305780994287217</a>, also Apple Maps as shown in <a href="https://www.androidpolice.com/apple-google-street-view-germany-no-excuse-being-bad/" rel="nofollow">https://www.androidpolice.com/apple-google-street-view-germa...</a>) and nobody cared.<p>This was about Google, and it was at a time where the large German publishers tried to monetize Google Search linking to them (again not caring much about anybody else doing the same kind of indexing and linking), and the Street View frenzy was to a large part a media campaign. My pet theory is that they tried to reign in on the advertising competition.
Meanwhile Street View is near useless in Malta because it's from 2016. In a country where most stores are very small and have zero web presence, Street View would be invaluable to find them but you can't -- unless they've been here for eight years.