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Comment by mopsi | Hacker News Reader

  > Heck, I hate street views disfigured by huge privacy blobs.

Why should you - from the other side of the planet - have an unrestricted view into my front garden at your fingertips?

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Why shouldn't I? Your garden is not of a particular interest to me. It's just one of millions of gardens that I might look at as a part of scenery, or to get my bearings if I happen to be in the area. You'd be better off fighting street views in general, unless you are OK with the Streisand effect.

I prefer not to have views of my home permanently archived and made available to anyone in the world, unless they can present a reasonable need for it. City planners? Go ahead. Local people for navigation purposes? Go ahead. But some random bloke from another continent? That's clearly too far.

Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.

This is just NIMBYism, literally.

Street View is one of the most amazing technologies ever invented. It brings humanity closer together. No longer do you need to get a visa and get on a plane to see what the world is like in a particular place. You can just look on street view. Throughout history people have given up their lives for that kind of world knowledge.

Your inclination to ruin one of humanity's greatest achievements with distance-based blurring to protect the privacy of what is already visible at street level is just sad.

NIMBY is something different, but I'm a proud NIMBY too. People can vote for what happens in their own towns.

At the expense of the overall economic health of everyone. See the rents in San Francisco for examples compared to places where countries actually build, like Singapore and China.

If that's good long-term for the people in SF who've already invested their time and money there, shouldn't be any other way. It's also not some zero-sum game where voting against development always benefits them at the cost of others; sometimes they want development.

It's not good long term for them though, as housing disparity statistically correlates to higher crime.

Maybe more development wouldn't have caused lower crime in SF, we won't know. And that's also not the only thing they care about.

> This is just NIMBYism, literally.

No. OpSec is not Nimbyism.

> It brings humanity closer together.

Sure, then they show up at your door angry about something they saw online. No thanks.

> Services like Street View should have distance-based friction to preserve privacy. The further you are, the less (or at lower quality) should be available, to keep it proportional with the effort required to inspect the place in the real world.

How would the website validate how far I am from your neighborhood? What if I am your neighbor but I am traveling this week? Can I still check Street View of my neighborhood? This is how we get websites to require ID-based verification for everything.

OK, feel free to ruin experience for millions of people.

Ok I will. I don't care, it's my house not theirs.

Watch for those indiscriminate youtubers driving around with their cameras.

There's not a lot I can do about that, but it doesn't really matter since random YouTube videos don't index my house into a globally available map view

> Your garden is not of a particular interest to me.

They why on earth do you care?

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