If you were to look up the home I own in the United States, and see it from Google Street View,
this is what you’d see. The entire house is blurred out including any cars,
entrances or other details. The good news is that the process to get my house blurred was
extremely simple and in just a couple minutes, you could do the same things.
Hey guys, it’s Josh here with All Things Secured, a channel dedicated to helping you improve your
privacy and security online. If these kind of simple tutorials and privacy hacks are
something you’re interested in, go ahead and click that subscribe button as we get started here.
Ok, in order to blur your home on Google Street view, you’ll need to start by
locating it on Google Maps. Visit Google.com/maps and type in your address on the upper-left corner.
This is just a random house I’m using as an example, but if this were my house,
you would want to click on the image of the house right here and double check that it is, in fact,
your home. It’s not a good idea to abuse this feature, so don’t try to do this for anybody else.
Once you have your home in view, you’re going to look for the tiniest
of links on the bottom right of your screen that reads “Report a Problem”.
The following screen allows you the ability to zoom in on exactly which part of this image is
your house. Make sure that the address on the top is right, and then choose
“My Home” from the menu items and in the required box I would write out your full address again
just so there’s no confusion. In my application, I wrote underneath that I was the owner of the
house and for the sake of privacy, I wanted my house blurred from Google Street View.
Now before you Submit this form, there are a couple things you need to understand. First,
Google warns us that any kind of blurring is permanent. I’m not sure if it’s lifetime
permanent, but I do know that once you set this blur, there is no way to contact Google
to revert back. Keep this in mind, cause when you go to sell your house, you or the new owners
won’t be able to reverse the blur and it will remain blurred even as your house is on sale.
I also think it’s worth noting that blurring your house actually calls attention to your home,
which might be the opposite of what you’re wanting to do. If I go down a street using
Google Street view and find one particular place that’s blurred out, as a curious human being,
my first response is to ask myself - what is going on at this location
that is so important that somebody decided it was worth blurring it out?
Finally, please only do this if you are the rightful owner of the
home. Not somebody with a long term lease or a short term rental. Owner.
Ok, back to the form. You don’t have to choose anything for the image quality,
so at this point you just enter your email address, verify with reCaptcha and click submit.
I received an email almost immediately confirming my request and then about 5 hours later an update
email saying that the changes would be made within 24 hours. And just like that,
anytime I visit my home address on Google Street View, my house is blurred.
That’s the end, right?
Unfortunately not. For example, I’ve noticed that even though my home is blurred on Google
Street View, that doesn’t mean that the Google Earth view of my home is blurred, and although
the quality of the image on Google Earth isn’t nearly as clear as that of Street View,
a lot of what you might be trying to accomplish by blurring on Street View is
negated by the fact that it’s still visible on Google Earth. It’s a bit frustrating.
Also, although Google has by far captured more street view than any other company in the world,
many countries have different companies that offer this same kind of visual mapping service.
I’ll link to a Wikipedia page in the description with a list of
all the different street view services, and if you’re watching this from another country,
I recommend you check the service that’s most popular in your region to see what’s visible.
Blurring the street view of your home is simply one step of many that you should
be taking to improve your privacy online. You can download my online security checklist,
linked to in the description, or watch this video next showing you how you can stop
people from even finding your name and address online in the first place.