Google Maps app is among the favourite applications for millions of users to plan and optimize their daily routes, intercity or interstate trips, and others. With clear detailed street maps and updated traveler information it has become a standard fixture in any modern traveler’s arsenal.
Is Google Maps Helping Criminals?
But this is relative since the convenience comes with a specific danger. Burglars and criminals are said to be using Google maps Street View before planning their heists. Users can use this tool to view clear images of home and neighbourhood at street level.
Other cases indicate that Street View is valuable in crime by helping criminals study property weaknesses. By such means, they can determine other access points, the worth and other features such as whether it has enhanced security features such as the best security doors.
Google Maps make this kind of feature easily available through incorporating Street View. Though it started as a standalone app, extension of it as part of the main app has made it very easy for anyone to inspect properties virtually.
To address privacy concerns, Google Maps offers a solution: Using its desktop version, users can ask Google to obscure their residence, car, or some family information on Street View. This basic measure can really boost your level of security on the Internet and can help you avoid scams.
Can Google Maps Street View Be a Risk to Your Security?
Security analyst Daniel Linskey has expressed his worries in how Google Maps Street View could assist criminals by chance. The tool that offering detailed images of homes, vehicles, and neighborhoods from all around the world gets the potential wrongdoers close to their target without them ever being physically close to it.
Apparently, repeat car break-in offenders werecrimestoppers.co.uktagged using Street View to scout homes for potential targets. They focus on properties in order to identify how valuable or worth investing in they are and more critically, they consider optimum times to enter or exit such properties. This capability helps them in planning their crimes especially at getting away with it as much as possible.
Formerly an application of its own, the street view has now had its integration with Google Maps done in a complete way. It has become easy for the users as well as even easier for anyone with an ill intention to perform these activities. It does help thieves to determine that some houses have security cameras or other sophisticated protection systems.
This, in turn, emphasizes privacy options while the inspection of properties from various locations and angles never requires more than a virtual tour. Google Maps has given users an opportunity to blur their homes, vehicles, or details that incurs such risks in Street View. But, unfortunately, this feature is only available only in a desktop version of the app.
These measures of equal importance are something you should do to minimize risks to your privacy. This way, by blurring your home or car on Google Maps, you can minimize the probability of turning into some kind of a target. Such measures help to provide users with the chance to use the app’s advantage and do not let them become insecure.
Protect Your Privacy: How to Blur Your Home on Google Maps
Street View is a good perspective for increasing the impressionability of towns and villages, but at the same time, a lot of private information about your house and the area around can be seen. For more privacy, users have available option they can use to ‘hide’ their homes or other sensitive locations to avoid being spotted by random people.
So, to anonymize your home, please, use Google Maps in desktop version only. First, open the Google Maps website and enter your address to see yourself on the map. To try the interactive view, go to your home in Google Maps and clicking on the Street View image.
Thirdly, on the panel above the recording area, there is the black rectangle with three vertical white lines on it, click on it. Don’t forget to scroll down the drop down list until you find the option that says Report a Problem. This action will take you to another page where you can zoom on the part or object of the image you want to blur using the mouse or the tools offered.
Google lets you request to blur homes, car license plates, faces, or any other features that might identify someone. However, if there are more troubles, for example the wrong coordinates or the poor image quality – all that can be reported at once. The facial features which might have been visible on Google Maps after the blur operation will not be seen by other third parties.
Through such measures it is possible to cover one’s traces, at the same time as continuing to use the Google Maps service. One of the features missing in the mobile version, but present in the desktop one, has to do with personal safety and security.
