Eggs thrown at German Street View opt-out homes

Pro-Google scramblism

Vandals have attacked the houses of German home-owners who opted out of Google's Street View service, which began rolling out across the country this month.

Homes in the Bergerhausen area of Essen, western Germany were pelted with eggs, according to local media reports. Some houses had messages reading 'Google's cool' pinned to their doors.

All of the homes attacked were among the 250,000 German households who scrambled to opt out of Google Street View by having images of their homes removed from the service.

The search giant claimed the attacks boiled down to a "one-off incident".

But given the hot water Google has got into in Germany over its poaching of Wi-Fi data, we can't help feeling the search giant was a little over-easy on the vandals.

"We respect people's right to remove their house from Street View and by no means consider this to be acceptable behaviour," a Google spokesperson said.