I much prefer living in a place that errs on the side of too much caution when it comes to privacy. You say "easily manipulated", I say that they have social memory of the horrors of the Stasi. After the fall of the Berlin wall, the Stasi archives were disclosed. The awareness of the amount of information hoarded on so many citizens with the help of friends, family & neighbors was deeply traumatic. Some people even decided they didn't want to know, so that they wouldn't find something about someone close that was hard to forgive.

In my view, this cultural and social memory makes the Germans less insane on the topic of privacy, not more. We can see very well how in most of the modern world how insidious the process is. We make small concessions, little by little, and soon we live under total surveillance. It doesn't seem like that long ago that using your real identity on the internet was considered unwise. Now people are voluntarily giving deeply personal information to shady operations such as FB.

I hope the Germans are not convinced by people like you, and that they remain healthily paranoid about privacy. It's one of the things I appreciate the most about living here. I feel the laws actually protect me against the bad guys on this topic.

One problem with StreetView is that it has pictures of people and cars with a timestamp. It could be used to prove someone's whereabouts at a given time.

Yes, I know the car plates and faces are blurred, but when I go around my village with streetview, I can still often tell who that person is even though the face is blurred.