Posted on March 24th, 2009 by Barry Collins

How easy is it to vandalise Street View?

Answer: alarmingly easy. Last Friday, I asked Google to remove a photo of me and my young family standing on a Kensington street. This morning, I received an email confirming my image had been removed. Just one problem: it wasn’t me or my family in the picture.

Google, it appears, will take down any image – without any checks or balances – if you appear to have a legitimate complaint. In my case, I argued the picture of my pretend family and I standing outside our house was a “privacy concern”. Google asked for no proof of identity, other than a contact email address (which was a generic Gmail account, with no surname to cross-reference against the address). On that flimsiest of pretext, we’ve been able to black out part of a Kensington street.

We will, of course, ask Google’s press office to reinstate our deleted image. But our little experiment highlights how effortless it is to vandalise the service. How easy would it be, for example, to remove a photo of a rival business from the high street, by claiming you’ve been caught walking past?

Google says it has measures in place to deal with vandalism. “While we trust the vast majority of our users not to abuse the removals system inevitably a small number may be determined to do so,” a spokesperson told PC Pro. ”We have controls in place to deal with spam and illegitimate requests and we believe that in the majority of cases irregular activity will be picked up. “

Our fake takedown has also highlighted another problem – it didn’t really work. This is the image we asked to be removed:

Sure enough, there’s now a black hole when you attempt to view the address from Street View. But when you move slightly further down the street and use the zoom function, you can still see the family standing outside the house:

The different pose suggests the family were caught on camera twice by the cameras as the Google van moved down the street, and while the first image has been removed, the second one still remains in the database. So the takedown failed to protect our fake family’s privacy. Indeed, it’s arguably easier to identify the family in the second photo than it is in the first.

It seems Google has more than a few kinks to sort out before Street View will appease the privacy lobby.

Tags: Google, privacy, Street View

Posted in: Newsdesk

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12 Responses to “ How easy is it to vandalise Street View? ”

Charles Marsh Says:
March 25th, 2009 at 1:32 am
Could it be that what you did was illegal? Is the BBC Click disease catching? Providing deliberately false information that causes a cost to the recipient – the cost of processing your request and the fact that Google unnecessarily damage their own product – sounds like the basis of fraud to me.

Any alternative process would have to be as general as the current one. What do all the people caught on Street View have in common? Apart from being on Street View, almost nothing. The law has long had a solution to what is a more general issue of generating evidence. Google could require a statutory declaration and could provide a suitable text on their website. A person who wants their image removed would print this off, along with the offending Street View image. These would be taken to a solicitor or other commissioner for oaths. The signing of the declaration would be witnessed and the Street View image initialled. This would cost £7. Google would need to provide a postal address for submission of the signed declaration and exhibit, although they could also accept service by fax or email for convenience.

Requiring a statutory declaration would be a major inconvenience to Google, seriously upset their users and gain virtually nothing. However, it appears that something like this was tried in the US, along with requiring photo ID that not everyone has.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/06/want_off_street.html

Could you not have submitted all the images with the family in them? It seems to be a case of Google only going as far as they are pushed. If they had provided a comprehensive facility for image removal at the outset, it would have been a tacit admission of a problem. The idea seems to be that you select only the part of the panorama that is of concern, although the rectangle is fixed so it has a maximum size and set aspect ratio. It looks as if Google have yet to implement the required wizardry to obscure just that rectangle and geometrically transform that rectangle to all the neighbouring panoramas.
Barry Collins Says:
March 25th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Charles – I’d say there’s a big difference between buying and running your own botnet on 20,000+ innocent people’s PCs and having one image removed from Street View, which we’ve asked to be replaced.

On the issue of whether we should have reported all the images of the family, we only saw the one image when we first reported it. I suspect the second image only came to light when the first one was removed (the withdrawn image may have overlapped the one beneath it).
Michael Says:
March 26th, 2009 at 9:06 am
It was ok what you guys did. I find investigative journalism has to bend the rules a bit to get results. It’s sad enough that there is barely any investigation going on in the world of journalism anymore, especially in the tech business (mostly just rehashing of press releases), so I am glad you guys do this kind of stuff.

As for google: the first thing I thought was: wtf? For ages now they offer the “face” parameter in google image search to find only faces. So why not use that kind of filter on their street view images and blur out all faces or the whole person? Would be better than a black screen for sure!
Tony Coleby Says:
March 26th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Well done Barry for highlighting this. An interesting contrast to the Daily Mail brigade’s complaints and fears about Street View.
Dan Says:
March 26th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Michael: Google does automatically blur all faces. It has issues though. It can’t tell the difference between a pedestrian face, a giant poster with a face, or a carriage horse’s face; and will blur all three equally.
IanB Says:
March 26th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Street view needs a good poking like this. It’s a load of pernicious cobblers and even less useful than SatNav. About humpty tump years ago maps were invented and to get from A to B, are all we need. If you want to see what a place looks like, try Flickr or Panoramio et al and get some quality shots. Street view gives us nothing. If you trust decisions to what you see on there, you’re crackers as its already out of date. It just gives swivel chair tatties and lazy employees yet another opportunity to waste their lives.
sjj1805 Says:
March 26th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
It tickles me when I read some of the complaints about street view.
One item I read on ITV teletext was from someone who said “It will create a field day for the burglers who can look to see if you’re at home!”

So what’s the next complaint from al these privacy champions – a ban on taking our digital camera to the beach?
Steve Cassidy Says:
March 27th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
I’ve actually used Street View, though possibly not as Google or the subjects intended – to verify the nature of a postal address which seemed to be at the root of a mail-order fraud problem. Conversely, I’ve found that a very small business sitting in the back room of someone’s house, ho thought it would be a good idea to get themselves a Google listing, turn up on Google Maps when they’re not being searched for.

I think the problem with Google is actually a lot bigger than these isolated incidents suggest; I think they have little or no idea how much privacy people want or need in their everyday lives. There is no word for “variable perception of privacy” and perhaps there should be – I was talking to my accountants about this when they were worrying about privacy of data in financial dealings, and one comment they made was that they had plenty of clients who didn’t even want their wives to know how much money they made in a year…

Then there’s the snobbery problem. Suppose you bid on something trivial on Ebay,and your written postal address is pretty nondescript – but Street View shows you live in a 2 million pound mansion. Is freedom of information doing you any good? Do you have recourse, with Google? Should your insurance premiums change?
patrick flanagan Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Street view is brilliant. I was in Australia last year and I literally traced my footsteps. As for the privacy if you do not want to get caught going into a sex shop or whatever, put a bag over your head.
simbr Says:
April 12th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Dan: I think it has more issues than that – when I looked up my house it had blurred out random sections of brick wall.
Colin Says:
April 18th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
I just ‘drove’ down Knightsbridge to try and identify the number of some buildings I am doing architectural research on and found several missing. They seem to have got wise to you tho, as turning round still left a blank. V irritating as I’ll now need to make a real trip back there again to cover the errors in my note taking!

Incidentally I have no idea how they join up the images – but if you go to Pimlico Road, London and look at the roads N and S of it you will see where the joins don’t.
Rob Says:
April 20th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
I’m fairly pissed off with the abundance of all those paranoid people here in this country. I’ve seen myselff on street view but nobody but me is able to recognise the blurred facial image of me. So I find no reason to have it removed.
What really annoys me is that someone on my street has asked Google to remove the street view images of the whole street. These include the ones of my house as the houses on my street are terraced. I’ve now asked Google to put those images of my house back again but until then, so much for the tyranny of the paranoids!! If they don’t I guess I’ll have to take pictures of my house with my own camera and tag them onto Google Earth.