Hmmm that may be why I can't find the neighbor's house ... I wanted to see it as it's far from the road, haven't been in there in 50 years and it's had some major renos done with some interesting history to it.

What a good thing. Thanks for letting us know.

Do they blur it, or remove the image completely? I tried to see one of my former homes, and there was no image.

It's blurred. Here's a former home of mine. Some images seem to be blurred a bit more than others.

Photos aren't posting from my phone for some reason ...

My home doesn't have a street view on google. But it has been four years and the pictures and info from when it was listed for sale still are on internet. Why? The house has been sold for four year. There is no need for it to still be there.

I can see doing it if I was famous or had enemies. lol. Maybe one of you can help. I know there are deliberate blacked out areas on GE, black, not blurry.

But my GE has tons of blacked out spaces that shouldn't be there and I have no clue how to fix it.

It would never occur to me to block the view. I love the service so much. I use a PO box instead of my address for all non personal correspondence, so my coordinates are not floating around much.

Last week I was looking at GE street view and nearly fell out of my chair LMAO. I was checking out a park a block away from my BIL and SIL's house, and I'll be darned the GE car was right behind them while they were taking a walk! When I called to tell them they're famous, they had no idea the car was following them.

I wish someone would check this out for me and tell me if you see what I see. Go to Strawberry Fields in Central Park, NYC. It will let you look at the large round Imagine engraving on the ground inside the park. Drag the man there, and scroll around it, and tell me if you see a man in the nude squatting. I think his bottom is blurred.

I even saw a ghost looking out the window in England.

Jen, sorry to hijack your thread but I live on GE when I have time. :)

/continue hijack/

I work for a lawn maintenance company. The image of one of our customer's houses included both of us working in the yard. It's since been replaced with a different image. :(

/hijack

It has nothing to do with being famous or important. If the information on how to remove your home's image from the eyes of the world isn't of any value to you, just disregard. :-) I too have enjoyed using Google Earth to look at places I've been or lived, or places to which I'll be traveling. That said, nobody needs to see where my front door, windows, and privacy fence are located. The would-be thieves who use GE to case an area may be few and far between, but I'd rather not take any chances. YMMV. (Such are things I think about due to our traveling and being away from home for extended periods.)

Oak, I saw no naked people at Strawberry Fields on GE. Lots of people in shorts, maybe too crowded to be naked?

I do like google street view for when I have to go to a building or someones home I never been to before. It is easier driving down a street looking for a building or house than looking for a street number that could be anywhere on a mailbox, front door, garage, rock in yard, or where ever people decide to stick the house number. Some people don't even have their street number on their house.

They just updated our image. It was trash day. The most prominent feature in the picture is the trashcan. My DH's family jokes that in every vacation picture, there was always a garbage can in the picture. This just continues the long tradition.

Just to be clear, is this something Houzz is enabling or just anybody that has your address can do, if they know your address?

It's Google images. Nothing to do with whatever Houzz is doing.

bossy, it's a feature of Google. Nothing to do with Houzz. And yes, if anyone has your street address, they can view your home on Google Street View (in most cases).

Bossy, you can put any address into Goggle Maps (and some other apps) and get street views of that address. Has nothing to do with Houzz.

Everyone should take the time to look up their own address and see what is available to see.

I believe Yahoo and Bing also have street view features, but don't contain as many addresses as Google.

I like looking at the picture of my house on Google street view. It is six years old and I am totally amazed at how much the trees and garden have grown. Actually some of it is overgrown now. I planted a tree at the side of the house that is big now but was just a sapling in the picture. I also was planning to get a new roof and the roofers had nailed three samples of shingles on the roof so I could choose one. You can see the samples in the picture.

My son's picture is on street view riding his bike up a hill. He saw the truck go by.

I looked back at several houses I used to live in. All gone to pot unfortunately, with topped trees, overgrown with weeds, mature trees removed. Sad.

I looked all around the Imagine circle and didn't see anyone without pants, much less naked. From one view I saw a guy squatting at the circle but he's wearing black shirt and pants.

When did you see the naked guy? My imagery is from Aug 2012.

So, I followed the directions. They just sent me an email telling it would be done in 24 hours. I checked and they've already blurred it. I live on a pretty busy road surrounded by subdivisions. I just removed a bunch of overgrown hedges and plan to replace them. The property seems really exposed without them. In my case, it's a good thing.

My house was also photographed on garbage day, and the photo is fairly recent, since it shows my new house color. No cars are in the photo.

My way of thinking about burglars is that if indeed they are using Google street view and they see a house that is blurred, that might make them think that that house is more interesting because it has something to hide and that they would then go in person to check it out. A house that is not blurred may not catch their interest as much.

When we're out of town, we have the neighbors watch our house, and the neighbors across the street almost always have a teenage son playing in the front yard. Almost all of my neighbors are on nextdoor.com and are extremely vigilant - perhaps too much so. And they might be a big racist, as they always post messages about people walking through the neighborhood that are not white. I also live close to an L.A. Police Academy, and the police cadets like to jog down my street at least once a week because my street has very little traffic. Crime is very low on my street, although I would not say it is non-existent. BTW, I cannot see my main security camera on Google. I would be concerned if I could see the back view of the house, but I'm not concerned about the front view, since anyone driving down the street can see that as well.

"My way of thinking about burglars is that if indeed they are using
Google street view and they see a house that is blurred, that might make them think that that house is more interesting because it has something to hide and that they would then go in person to check it out. A house that is not blurred may not catch their interest as much."

1968 or so I bought my first house in an old neighborhood in Phoenix. An old Mexican man seeing me lock my door and gate advised me to not do that as the vagrants would wonder what I might have worth stealing. I left the house unlocked for 13 years and never lost anything. I did lock my car once and, sure enough, someone broke into it.

I’ll have to think about this. Blurring could shed even more attention. On the other hand, so many people are installing security cameras, it seems to me they are catching more criminals b/c of them.

A bit OT but a prominent heart surgeon in Houston was recently murdered riding his bike to work. A camera (though unclearly) caught the killer, also on a bike, shooting doc.

All this to say it seems cameras do more good than not.

Kind of interested to know where y'all live that there are so many more crimes as to necessitate so much extra security, because the numbers on crime in most areas are falling, not rising.

Frankly, where I live if a house is blurred out in google street, I just assume it's being used for a witness protection program or some such thing. My childhood home appears to be. Not only will street view not even go there---it jumps to the houses on either side, and the aerial is blurred out--but I recently needed a copy of an old warranty deed and it was nearly impossible to find the address records online, although the county has a good website that usually makes it easy.

Personally, I loathe the sheer nosiness of most cameras. For instance, the guy who bought my old townhouse has put up cameras upstairs focused not on his property but on the parking lot, so he spies on all activity here year-round, even though he's only down here a couple of months in the winter. Since the last big crime wave here consisted of someone who left a fishing rod on his front porch for three days and it disappeared, and that was six years ago, I see no justification for it other than innate creepiness.

I reckon there could be any number of reasons why someone would wish to have their house blurred. Bit of jumping to conclusions to assume it's due to something nefarious. Like I said above - either make use of this information or don't. I truly don't care, but I am personally impressed that the option exists, allowing private citizens more control over what is up for view online.

I only thought of protecting my privacy as crime deterrent but what would the other reasons be?

I’m not sure how this would deter crime anyway. A lot of the street view pictures are old. What’s there to see? I just looked up an old boyfriend’s house and saw that his garage fell down and he didn’t replace it. It would prevent that sort of thing, lol.

I used to leave my back yard gate in Venice unlocked because I never expected anyone to wander into my back yard. However, my neighbor told me that a couple of teenage boys (surfers) went into my yard and stole three or four mangoes from my tree. They told my neighbor (who saw them) that they knew me, and when he asked them what my name was, they ran off with the mangoes. I was pretty upset about that. The neighbor's somewhat feeble father-in-law (who lived in the garage apartment in back) once came into my back yard, knocked on my kitchen door and demanded that my housemate Bernard take him to the bank so that he could get some money to buy a steak. Bernard does not know how to drive or have a car or drivers' license, and so he told me that I needed to take this man to the bank. I told Bernard that that would be kidnapping and that I would do nothing of the kind. I told my neighbor about this, and he said that his FIL did escape from time to time and get lost, and they would have a difficult time trying to find him.

I did start locking my back yard gate after that. These days I have to leave by gate unlocked when L.A. DWP comes to check my electric meter.

I had a friend from New York who said that when he had a car, he always left it unlocked so that it would not get broken into.

I'm glad I found out about this too, so thank you. I am both paranoid and reckless. I'm okay with that.

Reasons? You might be operating a meth lab. You might have a stalker. You might not want your ex from ten years ago knowing that you live in a shack, or a mansion.

Basically, you want the privacy that you assumed you had a right to.

ETA Lars...lol about the car. I've done the same...It's less expensive to replace your state of the art 8-track player than it is to replace a broken window.

Basically, you want the privacy that you assumed you had a right to.

Yep. And what could one more layer of invisibility possibly hurt, whether or not it actually does a thing to provide any real protection? I'm going to assume nobody here would post a photo showing the front of their residence with the house number, so some of these comments alluding to the oddity of wanting to blur one's home from view strike me as a little strange. But whatever. "YMMV" is a phrase that carries a lot of weight around here at times. ;-)

Lars, those are some funny stories, but I'd imagine at the time they were unsettling! We always lock the gate to our backyard. You just never know.

Ok. So as crime and nosiness deterrent.

FYI....our county's Property Tax Office also shows a street view and our names. Might want to check if yours does too if you are concerned.

Ours does too

And while the most popular, google is not the only map. Bing and Apple maps, for example, also have street views.

Maddie, I can't find the exact spot, but the picture I saw didn't have many people there, and the guy was away from the memorial close to a path, squatting.

You can look at most homes if you google the address without using GE. Realtor websites like Trulia, etc, usually have at least one picture.

People post photos of their houses with the street numbers all the time. But it doesn't tell us the name of the street or town.

When we got a new 911 address a few years ago the post office wanted everyone to put their address on their mailboxes. We didn't. Fortunately our address can't be found on GE which I like because our nearest neighbor is a half mile away. Plus, GE only shows the front of the house where no burglar would enter.

When I was at DS's house years ago when he lived in a nearby town, GE showed my car in the driveway. It's been updated since then.