It's Surprisingly Simple to Get Your House Off Google Street View | Hacker News Reader

It's Surprisingly Simple to Get Your House Off Google Street View

bloomberg.com

25 pointsclaywm19 comments

If you want an example, look at 671 Lincoln Ave, Winnetka, IL 60093. It's a pretty famous house.

This sort of offends me - if they offer the option to remove your house entirely, they should offer it to all.

Funny, I wouldn't have thought that the house from Home Alone would be a big deal. It is interesting that the whole block that home is on is also removed from Street View as well: http://imgur.com/A03AhRX

About 2 months ago only the house was blurred. Now the whole street is gone.

"Home Alone" for the curious.

https://goo.gl/maps/7Qo43

This seems kind of ridiculous, honestly.

Unless your house is surrounded by high walls in real life, what it looks like is quite clearly public information.

So, yes, you're clearly right. The appearance of publicly visible places is public information - anyone can go get it, and nobody can legally stop them.

But there is definitely a meaningful difference between searching on Google and travelling to someone's home. In particular, travelling to someone's home is a symmetric relationship - if one has a security camera, one can see everyone who has visited.

> meaningful

With time as the x axis, I see a downward slope in this metric.

In some relatively small number of years, you'll have a drone the size of a mosquito which can fly to the home and take incredible high-resolution 3D-captures, all while either evading the hypothetical security or, more likely, blending in with existing drone noise.

At that time, how meaningful will be the difference between gleaning information about the appearance of a publicly viewable object by direct optical intake or by some 'virtual' mechanism?

Drones don't fly very far. It may be possible to rent one, but now you've introduced a third party that could be compelled to redact the images, as Google has been.

So to view the house anonymously from far way / another country, you'd still need to travel to some place nearby.

You're right that it's no longer symmetric, but it's far more expensive than a free and anonymous Google search.

It's not at all hard for me to imagine a peer-to-peer drone sharing service, with no centralized authority to compel, and nearby flight times to everywhere.

Shit man, satellites even.

It is ridiculous for people to be concerned with an image of the view of their house from the street. We have enough real privacy concerns these days that people need to stop acting like street view is a real-time video cam pointed at their home.

The only difference with traveling to one's home is they would have a better and more current view. Why would one need to know everyone who has walked past their house?

The StreetView privacy issue was so heated in Germany that nearly every street has multiple homes blocked out.

This could backfire if you ever plan on selling your house. Many prospective buyers will check the streetview, and the surrounding neighborhood.

Zillow includes the Google Street View image option on for sale properties, where available. It really does give you a better sense of the house and its surroundings.

I wonder if Google could/would implement a toggle option, so that homeowners could turn Street View on or off.

I work with amateur radio, and just this past weekend I was being nosy about who managed to receive one of my digital signals by looking them up on Street View, and their house was blurred out. My fault for looking I guess!

How did you get their address?

At least in the US, every Amateur Radio operator's address is available on the FCC website[1]. The other operator would have given his call sign, which he could look up there.

[1]: http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/UlsSearch/searchAmateur.jsp

This seems like it could be ripe for abuse... Want to obfuscate your competition? Wipe them off Google maps street view. I wonder if they have various safeguards.

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