STOP Google From Showing Your Home On The Internet

If you were to look up the home that 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. And the good news is that the process to get my house blurred was extremely simple. In just a couple minutes, you can do the same thing. Hey guys, it's Josh here with All Things Secured, a channel dedicated to helping you improve your privacy and security. If these kinds of simple tutorials and privacy hacks are something that you're interested in, go ahead and click that subscribe button as we get started here. Okay, in order to blur your home on Google Street View, you'll need to start by locating it on Google Maps. So visit google.com slash maps and type in your address in the upper left corner there. This is just a random house that I'm using as an example, but if this were my house, you would wanna click on the image of the house right here and then double check that it is in fact your home. This is not a good idea to abuse this feature. So please don't try to do this on anybody else's home that you don't own. Once you have your home in view, you're gonna look for the tiniest of links here in the bottom right corner 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 of things you need to understand, okay? First, Google warns us that any kind of blurring is permanent. Now, I'm not sure if that's a lifetime permanent, but I do know that once you set this blur, there is no way to contact Google to revert back to an unblurred image. So keep this in mind, because when you go to sell your house, you or the new owners won't be able to reverse that 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 trying to do here. 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's going on at that location that's so important that somebody decided it was worth blurring it out? And that might be the same for when somebody sees your house blurred. Finally, please only do this if you're the rightful owner of the home, not somebody with a long-term lease or a short-term rental, the owner. Back to this form here, 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 then click Submit. I received an email almost immediately confirming my request and then about five hours later, an update email saying the changes would be made within 24 hours. Just like that, anytime I visit my home address on Google Street View, my house is blurred. That's the end, right? Unfortunately, and as you can probably guess, no. 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 Google 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. So that's a little bit frustrating to me. Also, although Google has by far captured more Street View than any other company in the world, many countries have different companies that offer the 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 I recommend to help improve your privacy online. You can download my security checklist, link to in the description, or you can see the URL right here. And then you can watch this video next, showing you how you can stop people from even finding your name and address online in the first place.