Why Are Germans Afraid Of Google?

See, kids, that's why you shouldn't eat nothing but beer and sausages.

Why are Germans afraid of Google?  Why is anybody still getting an iPhone from AT&T?  And what does dead pornographer Bobb Guccione have to do with all this?  We’ll tell you, we don’t know but we’ll talk about it, and absolutely nothing, but we wanted to use the phrase “dead pornographer” in a sentence.  See, Uproxx News has all your answers!

First up, Germans and their lederhosen-crapping fear of Google.  Google is about to launch its highly popular and excessively prank-prone Google Street View in the land of the Huns, and apparently over 200,000 Germans have decided they want Google to make their home unrecognizable on the Internet.  Google Street View has actually been something of a privacy acid-test, which is a bit of a shock considering all they were doing was sending out a car to take millions of photographs and put them on the Internet without the consent of anybody pictured.  How was THAT going to be a privacy nightmare?

Well, it has been, as people have been photographed in places they shouldn’t be, doing things they shouldn’t be, like, say, letting your dog take a dump in front of a brothel.  Granted, not everybody is going through looking for, say, nude sunbathers or people looking at Goatse in Internet cafes, but there are enough busybodies and just dorks with nothing better to do than sift through millions of images for blurry shots of boob that this is apparently a problem.  Well, that and the fact that those Google-cars were also scanning Wi-Fi networks to see what people were doing.  Man, what is it with Google?  Do they have clear-glass bathroom stalls, too?
Anyway, 3 percent of Germans backing out hasn’t distracted Google from getting ready to launch the service.  Soon, Germans will be able to enjoy artists playing random pranks along with the rest of us.

In other tech news, despite the Death Grip and rampant jokes about the service, AT&T continues to be very successful at pushing iPhones out the door.  AT&T activated 5.2 million new iPhones last quarter, partially thanks to Apple upgrading the iPhone yet again, and everybody going to buy it all over again.

Ironically, that actually costs them a ton of money, as AT&T has to pay hundreds of dollars to Apple for every iPhone their customers get at a steep discount.  So their stock actually dropped a quarter or so.  Not helping were rampant rumors that a Verizon iPhone was on the horizon, so you could instead choose a provider that was evil, but at least efficient.

Then again, we just had our yearly Apple-a-thon with Uncle Steve, as well as a recent earnings call with Verizon, and neither side said anything resembling “You can finally get an awesome phone on a non-crappy network.”  So we’re going to file all those rumors under “wishful thinking”.  For now, anyway.