How easy is it to vandalise Street View?

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

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?  

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