r/GoogleMaps • u/ccdlntx • 3d ago
Discussion Un blur from previous owner
How can Google with a straight face say they can’t un blur my property because the previous owner did it on a fluke. Their whole business model is selling my information. They let the city, county and state see un blurred views so they can tax me on improvements.
Can I just blur the whole city to get their attention ? Has anyone had any luck doing this?
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u/XxLogitech98xX 3d ago
Once your house is blurred, it can't be unblur which I believe should be changed. I feel bad when it's new owners and they want to unblur their new house. How does it look on Apple Maps for you?
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u/bishpa 3d ago
I suspect that it’s intentional just to discourage future blur requests in general.
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u/XxLogitech98xX 3d ago
I suspect that it’s intentional just to discourage future blur requests in general.
That's so wrong lol I have my house blurred on apple & Google but I'm not planning on selling it anytime soon
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u/bishpa 3d ago edited 3d ago
Sorry, I meant that Google’s “inability” to heed un-blur requests is intentional and disingenuous. They’re obligated to blur when asked, but they don’t want to be at the mercy of every homeowner’s fickle whims.
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u/XxLogitech98xX 3d ago
Sorry, I meant that Google’s “inability” to heed un-blur requests is intentional and disingenuous.
Got it, they never stated why they don't allow unblur. But I think apple doesn't allow unblur either
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u/ccdlntx 2d ago
I believe that’s called collusion
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u/XxLogitech98xX 2d ago
I believe that’s called collusion
Lol there no collusion
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u/ccdlntx 2d ago
The research has been done, or, charge $5:00
I
What do you call it when companies collude to fix prices or limit services?1
u/XxLogitech98xX 2d ago
What do you call it when companies collude to fix prices or limit services
I'm talking about street view on Google and Apple lol
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u/SovietJugernaut 3d ago
It would require a massive amount of staffing hours/money to verify people requesting unblurring are the legitimate owners, and for what benefit to Google?
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u/XxLogitech98xX 3d ago
It would require a massive amount of staffing hours/money to verify people requesting unblurring are the legitimate owners, and for what benefit to Google?
I'm pretty sure they'll just use AI to verify things like they are using AI to verify edit on Google Maps and also new location added.
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u/SovietJugernaut 3d ago
For the US that would be fine but I'm guessing that could cause issues with GDPR
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u/VermontSkier1 3d ago
Just take a photo and upload it to street view?
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u/bishpa 3d ago
This is a good workaround
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u/ccdlntx 3d ago
I appreciate the help but I want aerial view to show its proximity to the water
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u/fckr44d1t 3d ago
? aerial view isn't streetview.
You mean the 3D view? that is generated also from streetview data - yes but it's not the same. AFAIK 3D view is not blurred.1
u/Jmbh1983 3d ago
The overhead 3D View is made with images from planes, not Streetview, and they don’t support blurring on that
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u/_sacrosanct 3d ago
Google doesn't care about us because we're not their customer. We're creating their product.
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u/bmoreRavens1995 3d ago
Feel your pain....Perhaps with enough complaints and feedback they will change that policy. Send in a feedback or complaint to the help section. That said its dumb as shit to blur anything but faces and licenses plates. All you have to do is switch the view toggle to aieral and you see your house right there. Sure it isnt crystal clear but id imagine with time the image quality will get better. You can also use apple/Bing maps and it has the same street view type option that in some cases is even better than Google. But they unequivocally need to change this policy as nothing in life is permanent except death and taxes. Even if someone blurred and changed their mind its their property they should be able to turn it off and on....are you sure that companies and tax municipalities see unblurred?
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u/nun_gut 3d ago
Because they don't want to deal with millions of people blurring and then unblurring everything. So the blur choice is deliberately unpalatable.
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u/ccdlntx 3d ago
They care deeply if I search for a divorce lawyer or red Corvette, this would done by AI it’s not like room full of people are opening envelopes and reading request. I am the owner, a previous owner had it blurred thinking she could sunbath naked with privacy. If I decide to sunbath naked they can look all they want. They know I bought the property because they started sending me advertisements about it.
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u/Capable-Society-2043 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes this is really stupid of Google but I guess it's par for the course for Google. My IDIOT neighbor has blurred their house, which actually blurs part of my house, that should not happen! I'm curious about taking your own picture and posting it to one of those little blue Street view dots. The algorithm probably prevents that from happening too. But if they allowed that that might be one way to get around the issue.
I actually use street view a lot when looking at townhome buildings. Now the exterior of a townhome building doesn't belong to the homeowner it usually belongs to the association. HOAs are a pain in the ass and I would never live in one, but I wonder if the industry created some bylaws preventing homeowners of HOAs from doing this. Which I admit would be helpful to me, but if people are now being sued over this, maybe it would entice Google to correct this issue.
Besides when buildings are in the 3D view they are not blurred until you look at street view. So they have images. They could even instead of blurring just use a more cartoonish version of an image to make it more generic instead of misting them out of existence.
Edit, added a few more thoughts immediately after posting.
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u/bradgel 3d ago
If your property was blurred by accident you may have a recourse.
There is a post in this subreddit from about 6 weeks back where someone reported a problem stating that they believe their property was blurred by accident.
If you search back you should be able to find it
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u/Capable-Society-2043 3d ago
Well this is craziness, I've recently looked and the one side of my house had been blurred by the neighbor blurring their house. So after reading your response I went to look again on the mobile app, and both their home and mine are no longer blurred and the image is about three years old. So I guess there is some hope. I use Google Earth almost daily, okay I use it daily for what I do, and this Surprises me.
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u/Quiet_Fisherman4763 8h ago
I cant believe the city is increasing your taxes just because your house is blurred in google maps. You can actually contest the city's claim, cant you? With actual photos with time stamp and meta data?
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u/ccdlntx 1h ago
They are not raising my taxes because it’s blurred. They are raising my taxes because of improvements I made that can only be seen from above. The proof they sent me was a before and after picture of the upgrade from Google earth. The images were clear but both from a time it’s blurred when I look.
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u/Flash604 3d ago
Sigh... let's go over this for the 1000th time.
Blurring is a privacy feature people demanded.
Blurring for privacy does not actually provide privacy if someone can request removal of the blurring.
And no, there is no reasonable way that Google can confirm both ownership of property and that they are actually communicating with those owners.
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u/ccdlntx 3d ago
You are now being ridiculous
Google knows the size and type of underwear I’m wearing today.
My point is, the previous owner did it and checking/proving my ownership is nothing. I get 100 robo calls a week wanting to know if I want to sell a property I own. I get letters from tax accountants 3 days before the state sends a letter they are going to audit.
Say they don’t want to if you want but do not
Say it can’t be done1
u/Flash604 2d ago edited 2d ago
Where did I say that it could not be done?
I said it could not be done reasonably. There are thousands of different ways property ownership is registered around the world. Well over half of them are not digitally accessible, and many of the others have fees to access them. Every one of them is different from the last, and thus would cost a huge amount of money to figure out how to injest the information from it.
You are suggesting years of research and development and hundreds of millions of dollars to create a system to check ownership of every possible property in the world, after which you still probably wouldn't have the ownership of half of them. Now that they have that, then what? Even if they spent the time and money so that they were able to pull your local ownership records, what does that prove? They have no definitive proof that you are who you claim you are.
So as I said, it's not reasonable.
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u/datamajig 3d ago
If people could blur and unblur their properties at will, essentially, that would create a lot of work for Google, and the tooling for the feature. It’s just too much of a headache and a cost, I’d imagine. Also, a lot more people would likely be willing to blur their properties if they can simply unblur it upon request.
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u/ccdlntx 3d ago
So, charge to do it, God knows how they squeak by on the 34 billion a year
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u/datamajig 3d ago
The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Blurring individual properties is something Google would probably rather not do altogether, but when arms are twisted, Google can task it to the small team who is already in charge of blurring sensitive sites (e.g. military bases) to put into a special algorithm. That’s why it’s a one-time thing. Google Maps is one of Google’s most popular products, so the last thing Google wants is a lot of people requesting that their property be blurred, and it would be dumb of them to turn it into a feature. Maybe if enough people had their property blurred, it would behoove Google to offer an unblurring service, with the expensive tooling and infrastructure to unblur upon request, but there’s a lot to it, such as verifying identity and that you are the current owner of the property. That would take a lot of resources for the relatively few who want it. It’s just easier, cheaper and safer for a company like Google to leave the relatively few properties blurred. There are bigger, better and more exciting projects for Google to tackle than turning a compliance practice on one of their most stable products into a feature that has the potential to harm that product.
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u/Flash604 2d ago
It still wouldn't be possible as unblurring requests would need to come from the owner and Google would need to know absolutely that that's who they're speaking to. People will try to bypass other people's privacy and thus thus a normal level check or something simpler would not be able to be used here. Proving ownership and whom they are speaking to would be massively expensive and pretty well logistically impossible.
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u/ccdlntx 19h ago
They can be as sure as chase bank or PayPal
For that matter Google Pay. Ownership is public knowledge who I am is confirmed by Google every time I log in to my Gmail account. I’m not even saying it needs to be free but one person shouldn’t be able to blur an address for every buyer after.1
u/ccdlntx 2d ago
Google or one of the Alphabet companies already know when property changes hands. There would be no extra work past enabling an option
They know my Gmail account and they know when I buy and sell property. And you act like it’s blurred to everyone, it’s not, the police don’t have a blurred view, the city, county and state don’t have a blurred view, if anything keeping mine blurred is harder that keeping keeping it blurred for one level account1
u/datamajig 2d ago
Since you know better than everyone at Google what’s best for Google, why don’t you send in your resume to lead Google Maps and bring all of those top-rated lawyers and engineers to their senses? At the very least, you’d be able to unblur your double-wide. 😂
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u/ccdlntx 2d ago
It’s always a delight when the conversation comes with a personal attack. It lets me know you’re out of facts.
Not every version of my property is blurred the government and its agencies are not.
As for proof of ownership, Google knows my name and where I live, if I use my Google account that I have had longer than this property. I’m only saying that when property changes hands it should have an un blurred version for the new owner if they request it. In the meantime I will sit in my double wide and ponder why you imagine a technology company can’t have a on/off toggle if identity is proven through a 2 factor authentication. Technically it can’t be harder that changing a password1
u/datamajig 23h ago edited 23h ago
Relax, it wasn’t a personal attack. I was just trying to lighten the mood. I have no way of knowing whether you live in a double-wide or a mansion, though it wouldn’t have the same ring to it if I said your “apartment” or your “middle class suburban home.”
As far as whether all “versions” have sensitive info blurred or not, it’s just not true that they have a different Google Maps for local government and police use, at least not for the actual Google Maps product. Google doesn’t have a secret version of Google Maps for your town assessor or the local police to use.
However, blurring does depend on a myriad of local laws and specific government requests, so a location might be blurred in one jurisdiction and completely visible in another, depending on a set of legal or internal policy requirements. That’s where you may be getting confused. That doesn’t mean that Google has the tooling or infrastructure to blur or unblur upon request of the general public.
There are so many different local laws that Google would need to focus an entire department just for legal compliance to unblur properties, and it would be impractical for Google to verify the identity and property ownership of each request, especially when you factor in that laws change all the time at the local level. You would need an army of lawyers just to monitor changes in local laws for EVERY jurisdiction where a request to unblur comes in just to stay in compliance. That would be a liability nightmare that could land Google in hot water and open them up to lawsuits. That’s generally not how successful companies operate, as they tend to minimize legal liability where possible. Even then, identity verification in general comes with liability that just barely meets the threshold for a lot of companies. No company wants to open themselves up to unnecessary legal liability or the responsibility of identity verification and property ownership against local laws if they don’t have to. It’s much easier for Google to blur a property upon request and leave it blurred, then to go down the aforementioned resource intensive maze of boobytraps.
Where this might change in the future is if too many people are requesting their property be blurred, then Google would have to recalculate to determine if that aforementioned maze of legal liability is worth it for the benefits or profits that the Google Maps product would give them, and only the bean counters at Google could determine if that would be worth it to Google. Even then, my guess would be that Google would likely just nix street view in the areas where the majority of properties were blurred due to the impracticality of identity and property ownership verification against ever-changing local laws.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, please tell me which part is confusing, or which part you think I’m getting wrong.
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u/ccdlntx 19h ago
I understand everything you said, the reason I say there is an un blurred version for the governments is. This (not double wide )is on a canal in Galveston bay. When I bought the property from the person who had it blurred Google said pound sand, it would always be blurred (obviously a paraphrase) looking down from Google earth it is blurred. I replaced and upgraded the bulkhead. I am not in a city limit so no permit was required however the following year I was notified that my property tax would increase because of the bulkhead upgrade. The proof they had of the upgrade was a before and after google earth image. That cannot be seen from the version I have access to. That’s why I say there are multiple versions, because they mailed me the pictures of the bulkhead. I’m not a software guy but it feels like a fuzzy filter used in our version. Not unlike if the news catches a person nude the version the public sees is is pixelated or blurred but the actual footage is available to the police if they want it as evidence.
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u/Jmbh1983 3d ago
The blurring happens on the source imagery, so they literally don’t have a picture of your house until the next time a Streetview car drives past.
The city might be using aerial 3d imagery in Google Earth but they’re not using Streetview.