How to blur your house on Google Street View | Hacker News Reader

How to blur your house on Google Street View

mashable.com

104 pointselorant80 comments

My house was blurred many years ago and I wish it wasn't. It almost draws more attention when you look at Street View, which is probably contrary to privacy interests. I've also had odd reactions from companies I've called out to do maintenance or yard work. Some of them never show up, and I suspect it is at least in part because they draw some negative inference from the blurred house. I'm also thinking about selling the house soon, and I just know it's going to be problematic. I've tried to get it unblurred several times, but have failed to get a response from Google.

>My house was blurred [...] It almost draws more attention [...], which is probably contrary to privacy interests.

You're commenting on privacy when you're addressing covertness.

Privacy/Secrecy qualities addresses observability.

Secrecy: information desired to never be known (eg Location of your savings)

Privacy: information desired to be selectively known (eg a medical issue)

Covertness: information desired to be unsurprising (eg the thickness of your wallet being a side channel to your wealth)

Covertness is context dependent and in some contexts, a highly covert entity can actually be less private than a highly private entity. Walking around town in a ScrambleSuit will make you more private but less covert. Getting the same haircut, clothes, gate of people in your town will make you more covert but less private.

I came here just to write about that. I don't have mine blurred, but I thought about it, that it'd be drawing more attention if it was.. When 50% is blurred, maybe..

Ah, the Streisand effect.

Wow, this resurfaces memories when conservative boulevard publications and parties in Germany turned people to fight Google Streetview in 2009 for "privacy reasons" and everyone fell for it and blurred their house. Today, everyone I know who blurred their house hates on Streetview pictures being close to useless because they haven't been updated since 2009.

Google just didn't update them after the mess they had to handle in Germany. And why would they.

Interesting, I don't think I'd mind not having the street view feature. The only reason I use it is to see how foreign countries look like. What are people using it for?

I use it to have a visual anchor of what the place looks like. While driving sometimes its not appropriate to slow down and read the building number, but a big visual like building color or shape will help. Especially if I want to enter the building where missing it means missing the destination.

Another use case of mine, is when I have to go through an intersection of streets or freeways with a lot of merging and diverging routes, I use street view to know which lanes do I have to be on to not miss my exits, or what signs would I read if I am on the correct route.

So in summary, large visual hints.

I used Street View to remember the name of this family restaurant in Munich I visited on vacation, where I met the owner - a really nice old German guy. I had a great time there, but the name of the restaurant is in German and I just can't commit it to long-term memory.

I knew I took a right, and another right from the hotel and remember the style of the buildings nearby. I have the hotel reservation email, so I look up the restaurant every few years, just to reminisce.

Last time I did that, there was a different restaurant in its place. I'd like to stay positive and think the old guy sold the restaurant and retired somewhere nice with his wife.

I worked in Kenya in 2000 for few years, & we used to go to a hotel in posh area of Nairobi for weekend getaways, on some weekends, for pool, food & relaxing. In 2015 I tried to look up Maps and Street View to see the hotel. All I remembered was that it was in a corner of a small roundabout, it had a pool in half arch & square joined, had a grass field & the entrances from street. Did not remember the street name, just the neighborhood name.

I remember myself sweeping the Maps Satellite to find the pool, field in 2015 & many times after that, but no luck.

Just yesterday I scanned the whole neighborhood, about 10kmx5km for pool torquoise spots in Satellite view, found my pool in 5 minutes, & then spent next 20 minutes walking around virtually in Street View as well as internal panoroma shots, was amazing to revisit while on being the poo seat. Also looked at various roads approaching to it, where we used to drive.

Of course I starred the place in my list for future.

I extensively use it to scout when driving into unknown places esp. small towns. It gives more driver point of view of things compared to map view.

When I was buying my house, I used it to check out a neighborhood as a first-cut filter, prior to spending the time & gas to go drive around in person.

If I'm driving somewhere new, I'll use it to identify landmarks for turns. While I'll often have the spoken map directions going on my phone, if the intersection is complex, streetview can help me get into the correct turn lane.

I wanted to use it for Germany prior to a trip a couple of years ago, but it looks like very little of the country has coverage, which is annoying. But it's their country and if they don't want camera cars photographing everything I can understand that.[0]

[0] I had a neighbor get divorced because of streetview. Back when it was new, the first thing everyone did was look up their home. Well, my neighbor saw a custom motorcycle parked out front that was not his.

I don't think it's privacy concerns that lead to Germany not being covered very well, Google just didn't see the benefit of going far beyond the large cities. I live in the suburbs and our sleepy little town has no streetview-coverage at all.

I wonder whether you can use the percentage of blurred houses as a signal for evaluating a neighborhood.

It was for privacy reasons, which is why so many houses are also blurred. Once a house is blurred there's no way to unblur it since Google doesn't take new pictures and as far as I know the blur would still stay at that spot.

Look at every country around Germany and you'll see a web of streets covered by Street View. In Germany it's one big blank [0] and what's covered uses decade old pictures taken before Google stopped mapping Germany on Street View.

[0] https://imgur.com/09Glxyo

I saw a Street View car driving around in Berlin very recently, maybe they have started again?

When you look at that map, you'll see the main cities being covered, but only them. Even rural Romania is mostly covered, while Germany is almost as blank as Bosnia.

Berlin at least still doesn't appear to have any significant added coverage over the past decade. Yes, there are pictures uploaded by users. But the Street View picture seem to be old. In Germany looking at taxis is a good way of telling the age of a picture. All the Street View pictures I clicked on have pre-2010 models. I'd thank they would update the touristic areas or city center first but they seem just as old.

I'd imagine that the privacy backlash is the reason they didn't see the benefit of rolling it out more widely. In most other countries with Street View coverage there's plenty of rural areas covered well. In the UK basically everywhere is included.

The neighbor got divorced because they discovered their spouse’s infidelity. The unusual method of discovery is incidental.

You say that today. Back then it was the great unknown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A

What do you mean by "it"? If you're saying the Internet was the great unknown, that doesn't seem to disagree with extra88 at all. The method of discovery -- the Internet = the great unknown -- is incidental to the fact that infidelity was going on .

I wonder the extent to which doorbell cameras have led to infidelity discoveries. I’m sure people sneak around back and all that, but maybe parked cars show up, or a suspicious spouse asks a neighbor across the street to see their camera footage from a particular day/time.

I used it one bleak winter to get a picture of the path onto a beach I visit with family every year. It was a scene I never thought to photograph, but it triggered the happy memories of smells, sounds, and the sandy wood planks under my feet.

For work, we use it a lot to locate and assign accurate coordinates to health care facilities. Looking for signs with names or address numbers. We also use geocoding software, but that often approximates a location based on the range of numbers on a block. For example, the address 150 Main St might be placed in the middle of the 100s block. Works for cities and suburbs with regularly spaced buildings, but awful for rural roads where a "block" can stretch a mile.

I'll normally use street view to familiarize myself with an area when I'm heading there for the first time, especially for something like a vacation. It can be useful to see where your hotel (or a potential hotel) might be located, get a look at the approach and the area around it, visualize how far a walk it is to the nearest bus stop or grocery store, etc.

That way when you get there, you already have a little muscle memory that helps you know where to turn, which direction to head out of the hotel, etc.

For me, this is most especially useful when traveling, e.g., figure out the kind of neighborhood an airbnb is in an unfamiliar city, or to map out that walk from the central train station to a off-the-main-drag apartment or hotel.

Used Google Street View and 3D when looking to buy a house. It’s 10x more telling than the actual ad. You can see the slope, street size, the freespace on the sides, neighborhood debsity, the actual land size, the roof constitution. Ad photos tell you how it was renovated inside, which tells you nothing that you need to know.

It did fee like invading people in their garden, especially the satellite/3D view. But so do the photos: if you are politically exposed or a Youtuber, it’s annoying to know people can use the ad photos to disqualify you on poverty topics.

When I house hunted pre-Street View (and even pre decent photos being available in many cases), I spent so many hours driving to take a look at listings which were a big nope as soon as I got there if not before. I don't use Street View routinely but that is a case where it would have been extremely useful.

It really is amazing how well real estate photographers do in making a dump look attractive. And I'm not just talking about saturation or other photo editing (though that helps, too), but in just choosing the framing and the time of day to take the photo.

Using Street View probably whittled my list down by half, and saved a lot of wasted showings.

It’s super useful to check parking spots, street sizes, shops a multi-story building, train station entries/exits, how a restaurant looks from the outside and not just from the handpicked pics on the homeoage.

Streetview has a ton of info that Google Maps will never get quite right.

For me, it is THE differentiating feature that keeps me using Google maps, rather than a competing service. I take an annual 7 day motorcycle trip though the southwest US, and street view allows me to see a road from ground level which is far more useful that satellite view to determine the road contours, and whether it would be a nice ride. Admittedly, in all the places I ride, street view hasn't been updated since 2008, so its no longer useful to identify business, but its still quite useful.

I use it every time I am going somewhere new. Where is there parking? Am I turning left or right to get there? Is there a protected left turn? How busy does the street look... is there street parking, or a parking lot?

Maybe this isn't as important outside big cities, but I like to have a plan of what I am going to do before I get somewhere. Otherwise, I might end up on the wrong side of the street without the ability to turn left, or I will be stuck in the wrong lane without a chance to crossover traffic by the time I see the turn in spot. In the city I am in, this means circling around and probably adding 15-20 minutes to the arrival time.

When I plan my travel and am looking for ho(s)tels I very often check neighborhood for "shadiness" using Street View.

Street view is really helpful for any kind of local contract work. Like landscaping, home remodeling, holiday lighting, satellite TV installation, etc. Companies and individuals that do that kind of work use street view extensively.

I use it in VR a lot to revisit the places that I've traveled to or lived at, often many years after the fact.

It's also particularly nice for planning trips (I spent a significant amount of time "walking" my neighborhoods in Croatia and Montenegro before moving to each, and a good amount of time in Japan to plan out a ton of nice walks/views before spending time there.

I've also had a lot of fun (in VR and regular street view) "walking" through places mentioned in old parents/grandparents notebooks/diaries, where they lived/worked, etc.

Not quite sure of the location of a business you're thinking of visiting, or even if they're still in business? Find their store on streetview.

Need to know the parking restrictions on that road, or the turning restrictions, or entry restrictions? Look at the signs on streetview.

Want to check the buildings you'll be turning at in advance, so you can make a short journey without looking at your phone? Streetview.

Want to know whether that street looks good to bicycle on? Streetview again...

Well, you want to look through the itinerary to not get lost in an unknown city when finding a building where you're going to have a work meeting.

What does "privacy reasons" mean? It sounds like you're implying they did it for other reasons.

And Bing stopped their service, too, fearing the same publicity. Here's a map of Google StreetView coverage in Europe, Germany and Austria are not covered. https://i.redd.it/r1lobjme020y.png

Except for those parts that are covered, which by my accounting is where a about a third of the population lives (in either country). Of course it's way less by area. And we're stuck in 2008-2010. I just looked up my place, it was kind of trippy.

They're still taking new pictures, by the way, they're just not releasing them -- yet. And it's not just Google, I saw an Apple car a couple of weeks ago.

Thread about unblurring

https://support.google.com/maps/thread/5010142?hl=en

Apparently anybody can request to blur any house and probably the blurring can't be reversed by the new owners of a house.

I wonder how successfully someone could abuse this to blur large swaths of Street View. It'd obviously require some effort to ensure Google didn't know all the requests came from one actor or group.

Sounds like a case of a sticky wheel gets the grease. If it became such an issue it threatened the viability of street view, they'd quickly come up with a policy to deal with it. As is its not worth the time to create or administer the ongoing ops such a policy would require.

Sure, but it could become a big problem for one street or neighborhood without becoming a big enough problem for google to care.

>without becoming a big enough problem for google to care

Well, that's the point. Google doesn't care if it's a big problem for a person, a street, or a neighborhood so long as it's not a problem for them.

It’s funny that the thread doesn’t say that there’s no way to unblur, but that there’s no way to get in touch with an actual human at Google to request such :p

I wonder if this might have an unintended Streisand Effect outcome e.g. people seeking out blurred locations in person to find what "they" don't want you to see (regardless of the fact that the "they" is just someone who cares about their privacy)?

I’ve never actually run across a “blurred” single home and wouldn’t really have the urge to look more into one if I did, but I have seen several cases where entire nearby streets are unavailable on Street View. I’ve gone after a small handful of those out of curiosity :)

Oddly enough, I happened to come across the first blurred home I have ever seen today when randomly picking a house to get a Sarasota, FL zip code — https://goo.gl/maps/eogUZfNsLBMEqWEK8

It's funny because you can just zoom out and see the house from satellite view in 3d and see almost the same amount you'd see from street view.

If nothing stops you from requesting blur for any location, you might as well blur random houses in your neighborhood or whole city, just to make your own blurred house less noteworthy.

The fact that this is permanent seems like it won't scale well over time as people who would blur their house move from house to house.

What am I supposed to do if I move into a house that someone else has blurred?

If you move into a house I imagine looking at it with your own eyes (and even from the inside!) is a much better UX than Google Maps, but maybe that's just me.

Not much you can do.

I certainly wouldn't buy a house thats been blured.

We blurred the house while we were remodelling. I didn’t know we could do it permanenty. Also, we need to ask to do it from street/satellite views as well

Why stop there? Put a blurred lexan glass around the house.

How to remove from satelite view?

Get it classified as a military installation.

I remember looking up some French prisons and they were blurred out. So I went over to Yandex and got an unfiltered look.

Why blur during a remodel?

Cause it was showing partial house plan and for security reasons we had to blur it :)

I'm curious -- does this blur it just in the current batch of Street View photos, or for future ones too?

(Cars/faces would seem to be only for current, but blurring a house seems like it could be automatically re-applied eternally.)

What happens if you rent the house? If someone moves in will they not be able to unblur it?

Apparently not. And Google also apparently actually deletes the imagery, possibly to be compliant with European privacy directives.

The article states that you have to give Google a reason, and google can request more information before bluring the house. So what would a good block of text be to request that they blur my house just b/c I don't want google to be showing my house?

The request for more information will likely only be to confirm you are owner of the property / residing there. As for the request, I simply stated "I want my house blurred for privacy reasons.". No questions were asked and the request was processed within a week.

I wonder what they do to verify that it's your house to blur. Maybe a "somewhat aged" Google account plus submitting it while in/near the house?

Not that it's a huge deal, but it does sound like it's not reversable.

Requiring people to create a Google account to request Google stop spying on them is just insulting.

I just checked the neighbourhood I grew up in, and the Google surveillance van snapped fresh pictures last summer. Because the homes are so close to the street, you can literally see into peoples living rooms. Disgusting.

A good reason to blur your property is to protect yourself from lazy public officers.

I've read stories about tax officers copying pictures of countryside location where some kind of spot had emerged, and use then to claim that a house without permit was built and advance IRS-like requests for taxation under the threats of legal action. No actual in person visit to the location was done, of course.

Whats the "why you should" part?

Seems like a great way to make life harder for yourself for no reason.

This feels like years ago when clever spam emails would ask you to unsubscribe, which really only sent them a confirmation signal that your email address was valid, and the human behind it was responsive (to a degree). If i go and blur my home, does that now send an additional signal to google for the shadow (or maybe not-so-shadow) dossier that they keep on me (and billions of others)?? I'll admit that clearly this speaks more to my lack of trust of orgs like Google. Then again, i wonder if i submit requests to blur many/all of the homes in my neighborhood - as a very mild randomizer effect - if google would honor all my requests? Or, if they would use other signals to try and zone in on my true location (using, say gps/location from my phone, etc.), and only allow blurring of my home?

> Operation initiated

> Dossier update in-progress

> Operation complete

How would this work for a condo or apartment type property? If just one of the unit wants blur, does the whole building get blurred? Also, what happens if that person moves?

You have to draw a rectangle on the area you want blurred. I for example, only blurred my windows.

It's sort of hard to me to imagine why one would like to edit out public and trivially available information about oneself. It only draws attention, and not in a positive way, like a hopeless attempt to conceal something obvious.

I can see the point when one's house is already behind a tall wall, invisible for passers-by, and it gets revealed on the Google maps 3D view. Blurring it out makes sense then.

So you have to tell Google what your address is?

If you have a Google account, I’d assume your address is already known. The form only asks for clarifying details and an email address.

How did they know my address from having a Google account?

Recording it as home in Google Maps.

So many different options: Shipping confirmation emails, IP addresses of connected accounts, GPS of frequent locations (i.e at nights when you're presumably sleeping), phone number for 2FA that can easily be reverse-lookup'd to PII databases, etc. etc.

Would you rather them able to blur your house without you telling them your address?

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