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“Hide” Your House from Google Street View

September 15, 2020

Google Street View is a great tool to help you find your destination by showing you what the area looks like from the ground level. That's great for recognizing businesses if you are not familiar with the area. As a privacy protection measure, you may not want your house to be visible in Street View. Lifehacker has instructions for how to blur your home from Google Street View. Your intention may be to prevent digital drive-bys from random internet strangers.

According to the post, once you blur your address, you can't unblur it. I'm not sure what that means. Perhaps it means that you can't unblur the current photo. Years ago, I followed the procedure to blur the photo of our house from Google Street View and verified that it was actually blurred. Today, the hours view is no longer blurred. My suspicion is that the blur request is only valid for the current photo. If Google rescans your neighborhood and captures another picture, it probably replaces the blurred image with a new unblurred one. In other words, if you want your residence to be blurred in Street View, you should periodically check to make sure it stays blurred. Otherwise, put in another request to Google.

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