With Google Maps, random strangers are only a few clicks away from knowing the color of your curtains, the model of the car parked in front of the house, and other details about your property. While security is certainly of concern, privacy might also be a good reason for people to blur their houses. For example, if you have a parked older car manufactured in last century, hackers may decide not to blackmail you even if they’ve somehow managed to penetrate your system. This helps hackers know how much they can potentially get out of a victim. For example, Google Maps quickly gives away the type of car owned by a potential victim or the quality of the neighborhood of the targeted person. One of the ways hackers decide how much to get from a potential victim is by looking up the victim’s lifestyle, which includes the victim’s home residence. Potential intruders have been using Google’s see-it-all service to plan house robberies, and fraudsters have been able to cross-reference stolen data with real life. Trouble makers are actively using the free service to see where couriers could be leaving parcels. Unfortunately, Google learned the hard way that unintentionally their free service was also utilized by criminals who used it to steal, cause harm, and damage.

Google’s tools are helping people explore other places and enjoy having virtual walks in different areas around the globe.

Google improved its privacy options by allowing people to blur their houses out of the platform too, again with security and privacy in mind. Alphabet’s Google has been pretty strict on the self-imposed rule to maintain people’s privacy.

They have been successfully implementing it for more than a decade now.įast forward to 2022, there are no faces or car plates openly exposed on the platform. And in 2008, the tech conglomerate began testing a technology that blurs faces and car license plates. In the early 2000s, Google was pressured to take security and privacy seriously. You might have already noticed, but people’s faces on Google’s Street View are always blurred.

Satellite view of house