The Haunted House – Privacy on Google Street View

harpers.org

16 points·b0b10101··8 comments

The strangest part to me is that the one block is stuck 10 years behind the rest of the neighborhood, in terms of recency of the photo, even though the house in question doesn’t exist at the later time—it wouldn’t appear, and wouldn’t need blurring.

It’s as though Google Maps is inadvertently preserving the house’s horrific legacy by refusing to forget, and refusing to let it disappear.

Is this really how Harper's distributes its content digitally?

I don't even see anything on the page. I'm guessing this is their anti-adblock tactic? If so I'm fine not viewing their content.

You're not missing much. The story is about a house that got blurred out of Street View because a horrible crime was going on there at the time the image was acquired.

The entire article is a PDF embedded into an iFrame, it doesn't render without Javascript enabled. It's very odd to me, I have no idea why they'd choose that format. Maybe the article was written for print and they just decided not to port it? I don't think it would be difficult to show this content in HTML form.

In any case, if you're really curious you can visit the PDF directly, with no JS requirements, at https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/September_202...

I wondered that too. Looks like a PDF embedded in the page. Maybe they still make some physical magazine and the web content is secondary.

It's an "Annotation" which I guess is different than normal? https://harpers.org/sections/annotation/

From their page:

Annotation: A closer look into the meanings and histories of everyday documents, diagrams, maps, and images.

https://harpers.org/wp-content/plugins/pdfjs-viewer-shortcod...

You're welcome.

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