How to Hide Your Home From Prying Eyes on Google Maps
With more and more user-friendly features such as panoramic street photography available on Google Maps and other competing mapping services, there is always a risk that your personal information will be captured in public photos in a way that you would rather avoid – whether it means from outside your at home or where you parked your car.
If you are faced with a similar problem, in many cases there is a simple solution – you can ask the mapping service to blur or remove the image. We’ll show you how to do this on the most popular mapping services.
How to hide your home on Google Maps
Google Maps Street View is incredibly useful, but you may have good reasons not to want your property on the service. If you are uncomfortable with a photo of your home publicly available, you can ask Google to blur it. To do this, open Google Maps and find your address or nearest landmark. In the left pane, click the Street View tab and select the image that shows your house.
Then click the three dots icon located in the upper left corner of the image and select Report a Problem . This will show you a page where you can select an area to blur. Click and drag the image to direct the red square towards your house (you can also move it to focus on the car or anything else that can be seen in the photo). Then, under Request Blur, select My Home . After that, enter your email address, check the box in the code entry field and click ” Submit” .
Google will review your request and wipe your home from the map.
How to hide your home on Apple Maps
Apple Maps has a Look Around feature that is very similar to Google Street View, giving you panoramic photos of locations around the world. If you find your home in this service and want to be cleaned, you can send an email to MapsImageCollection@apple.com and describe your problem in detail. Apple will review your request and hide your home from its services – usually within a week.
(If you are interested in learning more about Apple Maps data collection methods, please visit this page .)
How to hide your home on Bing Maps
Microsoft’s Bing Maps has a feature similar to Google Street View called StreetSide. If you see your home on StreetSide, you can ask Microsoft to remove it there as well. The company says it will review these requests and delete the data within 30-60 days.
To submit such a request, open Bing Maps and go to your address. In the left pane, scroll down and click any image labeled StreetSide. This will open up a 360 degree view of the area. To report a problem, click Report a Privacy Issue with this image in the lower left corner. This will open a new page where you can select Home next to the question “What’s your concern?”
Click on the part of the image that shows your home. In the image, you will see a red dot representing this part. Click ” Submit” to submit the image to Microsoft.
What about Waze and OpenStreetMap?
Services like Waze and OpenStreetMap don’t have a street view feature that shows panoramic photos of different houses or people from ground level, so you don’t have to (yet) worry about getting removed from those services.