"Oh my god!"
My wife was in the other room.
"Someone is taking pictures of our house and putting them on the web. Look, there’s your car!"
She was checking out our house on Zillow.
The Zestimate didn’t bug her. The invasion of privacy did.
What she saw was our home on Google Street View, which Zillow recently implemented. This comes in addition to the "Bird’s Eye" view of our home that I wrote about with some unease months ago.
What’s next? "Bedside View"? Hi-def closet shots?
Right next to the rather close-in street view of my home, there’s a link that says "Have a photo of this home? Add a photo".
Hey, we’ll see what happens. God knows who’s been snapping shots of my place!
Seriously.
I love Street View. And all this online real estate innovation from companies like Zillow is great … at arm’s length. Maybe not so much when "transparency" hits my home.
Thinking about this just now, it strikes me that innovation in home search has come to be defined by exposing as much as we can about homes, sometimes to a fault. I have celebrated this myself. But at times like this, I would rather see home search guided more strongly by fidelity to the way people search offline, which is more desultory, conversational — and private.
I also wonder why my home is shot through with Web 2.0 sunshine while the real estate transaction itself remains a shadowy realm. That bothers me.
The issue of online privacy as it relates to our homes is a simmering issue just waiting to boil over. I may criticize the NAR a lot here, but at least I can opt-out of some of the online exhibitionism in the new VOW policy.
You notice I have not linked to my home on Zillow. That’s a private matter between me and the next leering midnight searcher.
– Brian Boero
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Hi Brian, it's David from Zillow.com,
To be clear on Zillow's privacy policy; our interest is in the information about the home, not its owners or occupants. Just like you did not link to your address on Zillow, we won't display your personal details alongside your home's facts (even though much of that personal information is part of the public property records.)
One of the many lessons I've learned working at Zillow is everyone is sensitive to different stuff when it comes to whatever we perceive as our 'privacy.'
Streetview images are, rationally speaking, very far from encroaching on anyone's personal privacy. Your street is public property and the view of your home from the street has always been the most publicly accessible info about your home (far more publicly available than aerial imagery or County records for example.)
I understand that it can be a bit surprising to see the street view of your home out of its usual context but think again about whether you really feel that having someone see a your home from the street makes you feel less private. If it really does, you probably need to invest in a wall.
Google seems to have a pretty good process for reporting privacy violations and we've referred a few homeowners to them. In cases where people appear in the photos they have removed the image even though the person did not appear identifiable (at least to me.) But Google have also refused more than once to remove images that don't include any personally identifiable information and I must say, I support them in that policy – there's nothing private about the front exterior view of a house.
But Brian, do you really have an expectation of privacy with respect to the OUTSIDE of your house?
Since you bring up the way people search offline… one way I've always gone about home searches is to drive around a neighborhood to see if I like the way the houses look, see if they're maintained well, and yes, check out the cars in the driveway. A neighborhood full of BMW's and Lexuses is rather different from one full of Chevys and Hyundais.
I'm not sure I see the difference here.
Inside the house, I'm there with you 100%. But external shots? What privacy is being invaded?
-rsh
Thanks for this brian. Was having a similar conversation last night probably while you were typing this blog post!
I think transparency is overrated and in many respects disingenuous.
Louis –
I hate to be the one to break this to you but the people who drive past your home can see it.
But that's the point. It takes an effort to drive past the home vs. viewing it on your computer. The adult industry exploded due to the Internet (not that I'm comparing it ro Real Estate). It's all about access and how easy it is to gather information. When governments put public records online, more people have access to the data because of the ease of access. Is it wrong? Maybe, but you can argue that the explosion of identity theft is due to the easy access to records. So is it an invasion of privacy? Besides, driving through a neighborhood is different than peering down and viewing angles of a property that were not available at street level. You can say that it's like looking over the fence into your backyard. Is that an invasion of privacy?
Imagine what it is like to be really famous. It's the price we pay for the other freedoms and conveniences that technology gives us.
Have cake…want to eat it too.
@ David
Thank you for informing me that my street is public property and that my thinking is not rational.
I am not a privacy nut. In fact, the first thing I did when I moved into my house was remove the trees and shrubs that separated the home from the street.
This is about medium and context. Of course people can walk or drive by my home. As Rob Hahn points out, drive-by's of this sort are important in the offline search process. But think about this: Would you be a little weirded out if someone stood on the (public) sidewalk at 10:00 p.m. at night an stared at your home for 30 minutes? Have you ever had someone drive down your street and had the feeling they were casing the place?
The combination of exposure and lack of control (as you point out you are legally free to do whatever you like with exterior images of my home) is what can be problematic online. Doug's comment about the license people take when no one is looking is right on.
So you are right on the law and the "rationality".
But that misses the point.
Brian
David
I wrote
"I think transparency is overrated and in many respects disingenuous."
You wrote:
"Louis –
I hate to be the one to break this to you but the people who drive past your home can see it."
Are we talking at cross purposes or are you telling me that people that drive by my house can see that transparency is overrated and in many respects disingenuous?
What am I missing?
The privacy issue raised here is whether the new order of magnitude of public exposure of personal activities through Google Street View merits a policy response. There is also another very serious safety and security challenge posed by Google Street View and similar Internet-based tools that has not been discussed.
If the neighborhood busybody is walking down the sidewalk and happens to notice activities that might be embarrassing to the homeowners, current privacy laws can't stop them from telling the rest of the neighbors about it. However services like Google Street View expand privacy loss by many orders of magnitude and create the potential for far more serious consequences than disapproval or giggles from the other neighbors. Personally embarrassing photographs from these services have been widely republished on the Internet. Even though Google will take those pictures off their own site on request, the same views remain active elsewhere today and can be viewed by potential employers, business colleagues, relatives and friends. It is important to have a public debate about whether the additional loss of personal privacy from such tools merits some restriction of the tool owners' current unrestricted right to take and post such photographs online without any advance knowledge or permission of the homeowners.
The second issue is public safety and security. The Pentagon has prohibited Google from publishing its street view content of U.S. military bases, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has reportedly requested that Google delay the release of its street views of the Washington, D.C. area because of national security concerns.
International terrorists are extremely unlikely to use tools like Google street view to plan attacks on homeowners. However professional domestic criminals, many of them potentially violent, are certain to take advantage of these tools ease of use, efficiency, and detection avoidance properties in planning their criminal activities. Many criminals are probably already using them now.
Street View and similarly compiled ground level views of residential neighborhoods enable anyone with internet access to drive undetected, virtually and very efficiently, through residential neighborhoods. Users of these tools can stop along the way to observe multiple high resolution photographs from multiple angles, the features of every home, lot, and any of the homeowners and/or their personal property that might be in the photograph.
A professional car thief can use Google Street View to scout miles of residential neighborhoods in a few minutes, looking in driveways enroute for the brands and models of cars most in demand in the stolen car trade. Professional burglars or kidnappers can use these tools to identify homes in upscale neighborhoods that are well screened from the street and neighboring homes by landscaping or terrain. They can all use these tools to help plan the best routes in and out of the neighborhood for when they return at night. Using these tools, criminals run no risk that alert Neighborhood Watch program members might write down the license plate numbers of unfamiliar vehicles driving slowly through their neighborhood and report them to the police.
Existing satellite views are ineffective for these purposes. Overstory tree
coverage (the crown, or top part of trees) and terrain views do not reveal whether potential entrances to homes are blocked from ground level views or otherwise pose threats to detection. Satellite photos are also very grainy when magnified and can't be used to identify the brand and model of car in someone's driveway. Other Internet ground level photograph sources (county records, real estate ads, MLS's etc.), are spotty in coverage and/or would be so cumbersome to use for such targeting that few if any criminals would bother to use them for that purpose.
Current laws require companies to get advance opt-in permission from consumers for many business purposes. Because of the risks to safety, security, and privacy, it would seem reasonable to require companies that post ground level photographs of homes on the Internet to also get advance permission from American homeowners before doing so in the future.
American Homeowners Grassroots Alliance
Bruce's comment cuts to the heart of the matter. Bruce believes that there's a spectrum of "privacy" and that one thing can and should be "less private" than the next thing while still being "partially public." In my personal opinion, this is an unrealistic understanding of privacy. It's naive because once something is public you really have no way of controlling who has access to it or how and so even if there was a spectrum of privacy, there would be no way of controlling it. In reality, there is no such thing as "slightly public." Privacy is binary; either the front exterior view of your home is private or it is public. Fact is, the view of the front of your home is public and it always has been. It can't be "more public." Public information can certainly be made more accessible but people still have to consciously access it just like they've always done.
I have had this "if you can do it offline, you can do it online" discussion with David G before. He does not make any distinction which considers the nature and scope of the internet and its permanence– nor the difficulty to correct false or misleading online information.
There are distinctions which make offline and online activities inexact equivalents, both in expectation and and effect. If I may pontificate..
For example, a conversation in a coffee shop about my house between 2 or 3 neighbors is not the same as a Q&A conversation online. For starters, the coffee shop conversation is verbal and somewhat intimate between the 2 or 3 folks, while the Q&A online is written and is overheard by 2-3 thousand, or more, souls. In addition, that offline conversation is transient, like words writ on water, fading into oblivion, whilst the Q&A is web perpetual and Google everlasting.
And because of its vast reach and permanence, any online misinformation has a much greater impact, making it difficult to correct. That which makes the web powerful renders a comparison with any coffee klatch kibbitzing meaningless.
Now, to the point of privacy and house views. Yes, indeed, the outside of my house is public but the expectation is that it is public to folks who walk or drive by and not the untold thousands on the net.
Is there a legal difference? Maybe not under privacy principles but..
Finally, and to relieve the weary reader, a distinction which may effect legality is that Zillow or any other real estate website which displays my home WITHOUT my knowledge or consent is making a profit from it. That may be the shocker, like scalding coffee spilt on the lap.
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