Privacy is an increasingly pressing concern for everyone, no matter where you live or what your profession. There are steps you can take to keep yourself safe from prying eyes when you surf, but that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Physical security and privacy are every bit as important as maintaining your anonymity online. The problem though, is Google.
Yes, the very same Google that has brought us all sorts of wonderful productivity tools and made our lives better, easier, and more convenient in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, some of those tools and services sometimes come with a price. That price is in the form of an increasing loss of privacy.
Google Maps, A Mixed Blessing
Google Maps, and its companion service, Google Street View is probably one of the most widely used services on the web. The scope of the project is absolutely breathtaking. Easily on par with the size and scope of the Human Genome Project. Their goal is nothing less than the high resolution scanning of every square inch of the planet. In fact, Google just received permission to begin taking even higher resolution scans than the ones currently in use.
Depending on whether or not your car is in the driveway when Google does a drive-by on your street, the images taken are more than clear enough to reveal your vehicle's license plate number. If you're sitting on the front porch, your face will be visible to everyone. If your living room curtains are open, you could be unwittingly giving hundreds of millions of people a bird's-eye-view into your private life. If your kids are playing in the garden, they too can be clearly seen.
Even if you aren't especially worried about the privacy of your surfing habits, these things will probably concern you, and rightly so. Fortunately, there's a fairly simple way to remove your house from Google's Street View. Here's how:
1)Go to Google Maps and enter your home address.
2)The map's perspective will change, and it will zero in on your address. You'll see an option to switch to the Street View. Click that link to switch to street view and begin navigating around your street inside the map service until you're looking at the front of your own home.
3)Once you're at your virtual doorstep, you'll see another link labeled “Report a Problem.” Click it.
4)Once you click the link, you'll see a red rectangle appear on your screen. You can move it around and adjust its size. The goal is to get the rectangle to outline the thing you want blurred. It won't actually remove the image, but it will send a request to Google to use a blur tool on the section of the image you've selected. Interestingly, you don't have to prove that you live at the address in question. All you've got to do is enter a captcha and submit.
Google won't say how many such requests they get, or what percentage of them that they honor, but if you spend any time on Google Street View, you'll see evidence of it in action, and if there's something about the picture of your house you'd rather people not see, this is a means to help ensure they won't.
