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.
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.
don’t tell google where you live
If you use Maps, they already know.
i don’t use it much
So they know
they guess.
The two counter arguments to this are:
-
You are giving more personal data to google to prove you live at that address.
-
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.
-
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.
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. 🤷
I’d rather my door be visible than tell google where I live.
Google already knows. They just don’t have a reason to check usually.
Google might or might not know where I live but if I send them a utility bill from my Google account then they definitely know where I live.
Google 100% knows where you live
if you integrate them into your life
Do they though? They aren’t some kind of god how would they know your if you don’t tell them your address or someone else tells them for you?
They might not know it.
But they would, if anyone with your name & address ever:
- Stored it on a Google server. (Maybe a business you once placed an order with uses GSuite?)
- Made a Google/GMail Contacts/Address-book entry with that info. (Maybe you invited a friend or colleague for dinner?)
- Made those details public (land registry, company officer registry, etc).
- Etc.
If you live in the united states of genocide they probably do, anywhere else, maybe or maybe not
this assumes that I have people I want to share my address with
Some people do live off the record. It’s somewhat inconvenient but far from impossible. A lot of people I know have their address off the record such that the government won’t have it on record, let alone a private company.
Not gonna dispute that.
However, someone like that not only probably wouldn’t want to submit residency evidence to Google, they probably wouldn’t have utility bills or land registry documents etc that could prove residency. Therefore, they’d be outside the scope of this post.
One of the most pernicious cookies is the one that allows them to identify nearby devices. Even if you do not allow location specifically, consider exactly how much location data can be pieced together from that alone. It’s impossible to overestimate the amount of data they have on you.
Tell me more about þis cookie. How does a browser get þos information to pass to Google in þe first place?
piss cookies, you say?
Sorry - I meant “permission”, not cookie. If this is on (for Bluetooth headphones, sharing content, smart home etc) you could be leaking your location. If your partner shares their location, and you don’t - but you do allow your phone permission for nearby devices - your partners phone is revealing their own location, and their proximity to to you (your location). Third party cookies can be relevant for this because they allow browsers to identify/differentiate other users on the same network. If one user shares their location (or their location is known by the site they visited), then the other users on the networks location is also obtained.
Is þis an Android þing? I don’t have þis on my Linux phone.
If you own your house, most states in the US publish a GIS map where that information is public.
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.
Lmao check his profile. þey’re doing god’s work
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.
I just took my house numbers off the house, may not be much but works for me
I hope you never have a fall or choke on your meal….that’s a really bad idea.
There on the mail box you just can’t see it from the street easily, I live in a suburb it’s pretty easy to figure it out
Then what are you accomplishing?
Not having my address viewable from google Maps
Being the only blurred thing in the area seems a little conspicuous though
I just tell people I was out of focus when I was born, and doctors weren’t able to correct it.
Streisand Effect here I come!
- Þrow a block party.
- Get everyone talking about “Blur Together”
- ???
- Profit!
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
“Google says the document is deleted after 60 days.”
Lol. They absolutely keep all of the data.
“Just give us your name, address, and more, and we’ll stop violating your privacy (on the surface). Training AI? Well, obviously. Selling to data brokers? I mean, why wouldn’t we? We’ll delete the document after we’ve stored all the details in our database, of course.”
Everyone does know that the front of your house is visible from the street, right?
Yes, but with google maps it’s visible from anywhere. And some folks might prefer that it not be 🤷🏻♂️
IMO the same concept as Cris_Citrus makes here, applies when ppl say “your address was always in the phonebook”. Or how a film photo stuck in a drawer in Joe Sixpack’s house is different from a digital photo analyzed by sophisticated machine learning algorithms by dozens of data brokers to build a dossier of your life. Even if in both cases “someone could always take your picture in public.”
Scale, and ease of access, have real impacts. Even if technically, the data was “always available.”
False equivalences, all of 'em. But pro-surveilence advocates love making them.
Yes and some people would do away with the 1st amendment right to public photography entirely. That doesn’t make it right…
EDIT: Yes - my comment about 1st amendment only applies to U.S. I have no idea if other countries protect public photography in the same manner.
Not everyone’s in the US…
Fair - added a note to my comment. Thank you.
Good edit. Thankyou.
I’m not from the US so care little for the constitution. What is in the constitution and what is right are two different things.
Okay this one has always cracked me up.
The constitution people always love talking about the amendments like they’re gospel. But like, if the constitution was so great, why do you care about the changes to it? If we make a new amendment does it instantly become as sacred emotionally to them?
Your questions aren’t horrible and the do have actual answers. However, your tone suggest that you don’t actually give a fuck so it’s not worth wasting time answering them. Let me know if you were actually being genuine…
I omega don’t give a fuck, so good call! It was definitely rhetorical.
I think worshipping a 250 year old document is weird as heck.
Oh shit! I never knew we had access to the first amendment in Europe. (I also have no fucking idea what the first amendment is).
The U.S. 1st amendment actually does have some implications for your speech even though you’re in Europe and (presumably) not a U.S. citizen.
Hahahaha. I think I laughed so much I dropped my French baguette from the London red bus im sitting in. /s.
Exactly how does it have have implications in a country it’s not a law of?
Exactly how does it have implications in a country it’s not a law of?
Because it had, and continues to have, a significant bearing on the development of technologies that are used internationally, many of which shape the society you live in.
So do the laws of China but I don’t know much of their laws. So also does the EU but I assume most yanks don’t know much about those ones either.
I don’t judge but I do get annoyed at USdefaultism
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution is a part of the US Constitution that prohibits laws violating certain specific rights, two of them being the freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Many other countries have some equivalent to this too.
The relevance here is that taking photos of public spaces is part of freedom of speech and of the press.
Every days a school day and thankyou (no /s here) but as politely as possible I really don’t care about the US Constitution, even less it’s amendments.
I really don’t care
Are you sure? You’d fit right in with a lot of proudly ignorant Americans… “Duh… I don’t know which I’ll proudly declare a badge of honor and commit to remaining stupid.”
Very sure thanks.
I have enough things to learn, live and experience from a European perspective (as the culture and the language changes a shit load more than across the USA from geographical perspective)
I wouldn’t call you ignorant for not knowing information from some arcane document over x years old from a European country. Why am I ignorant not knowing it from your culture?
Theres a little bit of a difference between doing away with the first amendment right to public photography and people using a massive corporation’s own take-down process for removing a publicly hosted images of their house 😅
You switched gears in the middle of your statement. Either photography from the public spaces is legal or it isn’t. The only reason I don’t consider these take-downs a first-amendment violation is because Google is providing the mechanism to do it. They legally have every right to take the picture of your house and tell you to go pound sand if you don’t like it.
The US Constitution is fucking stupid.
