Skip to main content

Are you immortalized on Google Street View? It’s easy to find out

Google-branded cars have been trundling up and down many of the world’s streets since 2007, capturing panoramic images for its online Street View tool that lets you explore locations in great detail at ground level.

But have you ever wondered if you yourself have been immortalized on Street View, your presence documented online for all eternity (or for as long as Street View lasts, at least)?

Well, it’s easy to find out …

An image from Google Street View.
Google

Cast your mind back — can you recall ever having seen a Street View car driving along the road? With Google branding and a bundle of camera tech perched on the roof, the vehicles are hard to miss. If you recall one passing by, then the chances are you’re already part of Street View’s vast database of imagery.

Recommended Videos

If you can remember where you were when you saw the car, simply check out that location on Street View to see if you’re in some of the images.

Privacy rules mean that your face should be blurred out, but you’re certain to recognize that old jacket you’re wearing or that unmistakeable posture as you make your way along the sidewalk.

Be aware, though, that Google likes to periodically update its Street View data, especially in towns and cities where the urban landscape can rapidly change. However, even then, you’ll still be able to find yourself in earlier imagery.

To search for yourself, head to the desktop version of Street View and confirm the “image capture” date at the bottom of the display. This will show the month and year that a Google car visited that particular place. To check previous image captures for the same location, look for a small clock icon at the top left of the display. Click on that, and then use the slider for different years to step back in time. To enlarge the older imagery, simply click on it in the small box at the top left of the display.

In the future, if a Street View car passes you in the street, it’s almost certain that its cameras are clicking away, photographing its surroundings with you in the frame. In that case, hit Street View a couple of months later to see if Google has added the data for that particular area. You can quickly confirm this by once again checking the capture date at the bottom right of the display.

Some folks are pretty fast-thinking when they spot a Street View car and have some fun by adopting a silly posture or creating a bizarre scene that will later appear online. But take note — anything considered risqué is likely to result in more than just your face being blurred out.

If you’re actually keen to get yourself on Street View, Google posts a list of where its vehicles are currently operating.

Finally, if Google’s algorithms failed to automatically blur your face, you can request the company does so by clicking on the three dots at the top left of the display, and then on “report a problem.”

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Check out Google’s stunning new Mountain View campus
Google's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California.

Around 4,000 Google employees are moving into the company’s plush new Mountain View campus this week.

The tech giant showed off the new site in a video (below) that also offers lots of insight about the stunning design.

Read more
Google Docs will auto-generate TL;DR summaries for you
Google presenting new Docs features.

Google has announced some updates for Google Docs and other Workspace products at the 2022 edition of the I/O developer conference. Coming soon are new machine learning-powered document summaries, helping you save time and stay more efficient. Also in the works is a similar transcription feature for Google Meet, digestible summaries for Google Chat, as well as new visual video and audio enhancements for Google Meet.

According to Google, this new feature for Docs will add what you can consider a TL;DR summary. It will automatically parse the document and pull out the main parts. This marks a big leap forward for machine learning and natural language processing, per the company. The feature required a deep understanding of long passages and information compression and language generation, which had remained outside the capabilities of machine learning models until today.

Read more
The stylish Google smart lamp that you’ll (probably) never own
Google's dLight smart lamp.

Google has made a stylish smart lamp called “dLight,” but you’ll have to work for the web giant to have a chance of owning it.

The existence of the employee-only product was revealed in a tweet by Google designer Ben Gold, 9to5Google reported. Gold said dLight's primary purpose is to enhance work-from-home setups and also improve lighting for videoconferencing sessions.

Read more