Today finally saw the launch of the German version of Google Street View, after a month-long tug-of-war. A lot has been written about the advantages and disadvantages of this service and there has been even more discussions on the legality of this service. What I find interesting in Streen View is that it is a nice example of how Google uses legal loopholes. When our lawmakers put the “Freedom of Panorama” into the copyright law, I am sure not one of them ever thought that one day a monopolist from the USA would mount digital cameras onto cars and plan to take pictures of the whole world – they were concerned that you would not run into any problems when you took a picture of anything that could also be seen freely from the public streets. A similar approach can seen with Google's Booksearch: Google just started digitizing a huge mass of books and then later, will bother with making sure that there are laws governing the process. YouTube is another example of a service that would probably not have been such a huge success, if people would have only been allowed to upload their personal videos – today, the Film- and Music-industry has to somehow make arrangements with this power-player.

All these examples have in common that now, we have applications that, a few years ago, no one would have thought possible to even exist. The computing power of Google's and Facebook's server-farms is what makes many of these services even possible. When our minister for consumer protection Aigner deletes her Facebook-profile, then this might get her one or two notices in newspapers, which is certainly good publicity but fails to recognize the fact of the matter: Internet giants are driving lawmakers in front of them and they will only react years, if not decades, in the future. As a nerd that was computer-socialized in a time when Microsoft was the embodiment of evil, I view this anxiously. Back then, Microsoft might have had a monopoly – but they did not possess the amount of personal data that Google and Facebook hold today.