

It's Surprisingly Simple to Get Your House Off Google Street View - claywm
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-10/it-s-surprisingly-simple-to-get-your-house-off-google-street-view

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

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stevesearer
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](http://imgur.com/A03AhRX)

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

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FreakyT
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.

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dangerlibrary
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.

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jMyles
> 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?

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dangerlibrary
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.

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jMyles
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.

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

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

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jfc
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.

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th0ma5
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!

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pavel_lishin
How did you get their address?

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jakebasile
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](http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/UlsSearch/searchAmateur.jsp)

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fuzzywalrus
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.

