The two counter arguments to this are:
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You are giving more personal data to google to prove you live at that address.
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A blurred house on street view makes you stand out and can make burglars think you are some rich guy with valuable stuff in their house.
Yeah this is exactly like the DNR (Do Not Track Request) built into browsers. It was off by default. Turning it on was only done by privacy focused individuals. But it made you significantly more trackable because almost nobody turns it on, your browser becomes a lot more unique.
Thankfully browsers stopped supporting it. But this is the same thing. Very few people will use it, so that it’ll make you stand out instead of helping you.
Yeah, I was about to say, I’m not falling for this “privacy” service lol. Nice try, Google.
I read somewhere once that some houses are blurred after grisly murders occur there, among other heinous crimes like arson and rapes. That’s what I usually think of wwhen I see a blurred house. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a mansion blurred either.
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Google maps has a picture of my house from about 10 years before i moved in and it looks exactly like all the other houses around me…
…but i should give google personal information and utility bills to get it taken down?
Nah.
Right?
Do no do this, it will require more info to Google and make your house stick out like a sore thumb.
don’t tell google where you live
If you use Maps, they already know.
Probably if you have a smartphone they know.
Your DMV license is researchable so ?
i don’t use it much
So they know
they guess.
Feeding Google more data is always a good idea…
So now they know where you live…
Why would I do this? It’s just a door with a number on it.
Yea. I don’t really care either. I don’t see the point in making the effort. Unless I am missing something.
All it seems like is an easy way for google to link your address to the rest of your data.
You can confirm a person’s residence by the cars in front of their house. Cross reference objects in the background and if not blurred objects and features in their front yard. Blurring doesn’t totally stop this as I’ve tracked down people’s houses from satellite imagery and Facebook pictures to confirm where they lived.
Unless you’re renting, your home ownership is public information. You can lookup anybody in your state’s public records and know what properties they own and what their mortgage for it is.
Where do you look that up, and does it cost money?
Wow we must all live in the exact same place with the exact same laws…
I didn’t vote for this
I love this comment. The post is discussing a US company and how to remove your US addressed home from its database by providing proof of your home ownership, and some smartass has to point out that they don’t live there.
I don’t either, I can just stay on topic. I know Google won’t know what to do with my Arabic language deed that doesn’t match down to a single home easily on a map, but it’s irrelevant so I don’t just inject it into the conversation.
I dont see anything to suggest this is US based.
Tbh the outside of my home is publicly viewable anyway. I can’t think of why I’d care much.
It hurts Google, a tiny bit. If enough people do it, it starts to hurt a lot.
I doubt a block like þis prevents Google from training þeir DL machines on your house data, but it might prevent 3rd parties from getting pictures of your home from Google to train þeir’s wiþ.
It’s a legal, eþical means of corporate disobedience which works against þe commoditization of you. You care, because you don’t want to be a product, even if you don’t realize it.
þeir’s wiþ
You do realize the thorn is an actual letter and not completely equivalent to
theverywhere?The “th” in “with” is an eth, not a thorn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth
As an aside, theirs is written without an apostrophe.
per Wikipedia:
in Old English, ⟨ð⟩ was used interchangeably with ⟨þ⟩ to represent the Old English dental fricative phoneme /θ/ or its allophone [ð], which exist in modern English as the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives both now spelled ⟨th⟩.
In Icelandic, sure. Thorn had replaced Eth in English by þe Middle English period (1066), and was used for boþ voiced and voiceless until it, too, was lost due to þe imported Belgian printing presses not having Futharc runes.
Thanks for the correction and the history lesson! ♥️ I’m sorry for assuming I knew better than the thorn expert
Ha! I wasn’t before I started þis schtick. I’ve had to learn.
Lmao check his profile. þey’re doing god’s work
The house we moved to last year had been blurred by the previous owners. It’s permanent, so we don’t get a choice about it.
Tbh this is the only house I’ve ever looked up that was blurred.
I get why, but it’s also inconvenient. So many of us (in my area, anyway) look up the house on Streetview when going to an unfamiliar address, to help orient ourselves.
It’s not something I lose sleep over. But given the option, in a neighbourhood with no other blurred houses, in a low-crime, lost surveillance area, I don’t think I would have chosen to blur the house.
Have you thought about installing a giant blur filter in front of your property so it matches the image? Or maybe a good artist can give it a faux blur with some paint and other effects?
😅. Okay, story time:
When StreetView was introduced this dominated public debate in Germany for weeks. It was all the rage, “how dare they to photograph everything?”
One official even suggested “it’s awesome, police can now patrol the streets from an office chair”, because that is how much of a backwater country Germany is digitally.
Anyway, people saw immediately all the crime which all the criminal criminals would do with this tool (which tells you something about the state of mind of the “righteous folks”). Anyway, half the country was blurred, because everybody knew about it. And it is the reason, why StreetView is so patchy in Germany (or at least was for the longest time, didn’t check much in recent years) compared to the neighbouring states, 'cause Google pretty much said “Fuck these fucking Germans with their fucking shit”.
Apple came around some years later with their version, nobody cared anymore 😅
Im happy a lot of people care about privacy here in Germany. Thanks to that, we are few more steps away from the dystopian shitholes many other societies formed into.
This should be opt-in, not opt out. IDGAF if it is public information that is perfectly viewable from the street, it shouldn’t be on the internet without my consent. There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to blur your house aside from the worry of petty thieves. One, your privacy should be treated with respect. Streisand Effect doesn’t really apply here because no one gives a shit if your house is blurred. No one cares as streetview passers by. Talk to your neighbors and then the whole street is blurred like my old street.
This does not obviate the need for action at the legislative level. Google has used the streetview cars to collect plates and radio signals including WiFi information, who knows what else. They have so many databases of information on each of us to sell to adverts and to give freely to police.
This opt out is a positive, likely carved out by litigation, in a very very negative space for privacy rights.
This opt out is a positive, likely carved out by litigation, in a very very negative space for privacy rights.
It’s not, it’s less than Google used to do for these requests. In 2009, I requested my house be taken off streetview. They removed it by skipping mine and a few houses on each side.
Then they went down my back lane, so everyone got a good look at my back yard anyway.
Privacy today is a never ending battle, but Google started this nonsense a long time ago.
No disagreement. Like I said, privacy rights are not in a good place. 🤷
This is such a backwards-ass way to do things. I built my house using extra large bricks so it would be pixelated to begin with
Lol as i am going to send google extra information to get a bit more privacy back. Thata stupid
This does nothing but make your house more obvious. It’s better to blend in than to stick out.
It makes it harder to case the house though. If the street view shows a low overhang, with a easy way up to a second story window, or maybe a tree, A/C heat pump, all sorts of things, then I could see an argument for wanting that blurred.
Someone on my street has done this and it completely fucks with street view for my own house, even though the blurred house is on a sheet running perpendicular to my street
I don’t understand why anyone would do this, if anything all it does is draw massive attention to the fact that someone wanted their house blurred.
What is funny about the house that did it on my street move down one jump and look back and it isn’t blurred.
