Apple camera cars also on the road in Saxony

Apple is once again sending camera cars onto the roads of Saxony to improve its digital maps. The iPhone company announced on its Maps website that the eye-catching cars with their camera superstructures would be on the road throughout Saxony from now until mid-August - including in the cities of Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz as well as the districts of Bautzen, Görlitz, Meißen and Zwickau.

Apple uses the images to create detailed maps with information on traffic routing and stores. Apple's cars with cameras and laser radar sensors that can recognize shapes came to Germany for the first time in 2019.

Since summer 2021, this has also been happening in major cities such as Berlin and Munich with the help of camera backpacks. This allows the company to offer the "Look Around" function, i.e. images of streets similar to Google's "Street View", in car-free areas within its service. The new version from spring 2022 includes a more detailed representation, ranging from street coverage to 3D buildings in cities to the landscape including vegetation.

Apple emphasized that, as before, faces and license plates would be automatically blurred before publication in the "Look Around" function. Anyone wishing to request the pixelation of their own home can contact Apple by email at MapsImageCollection@apple.com. Pixelation requests to Google for depictions in Street View can be sent to streetview_deutschland@google.com.