When is your driveway not private? Stuff investigation forces Google concession

Friday, 21 February 2025

A Stuff investigation has opened a privacy Pandora’s box over Google Street View 360° photos, leading to the tech giant’s speedy removal of some controversial images. Senior journalist Paula Penfold reports.

On a suburban West Auckland street, down a long driveway, a woman with long hair and glasses, wearing a pink sweatshirt covered in red lovehearts, sits at her dining room table, looking thoughtfully out the window.

It’s a photograph taken from the rear of her townhouse, across her back deck, from the private driveway servicing her neighbours’ houses.

Her face is blurred, but in the context of the other information in the picture she would be identifiable if you know her and where she lives — or might live.

I note there are no security cameras visible. I can see what kind of lock is on the door.

I would not be able to see this from the road.

A few suburbs over, in Waterview, a woman is walking three quarters of the way down a long, shared, private driveway. She holds her arm across her face. It looks like she’s trying to shield her image from the camera.

Rotate the image around a few degrees. A man, with his face blurred but everything else about him identifiable, is standing at a table outside a garage, preparing baskets and trays laden with meat.

Spin the picture around some more and the shadow of the Google Street View camera mounted on top of a car is visible on the concrete at the end — in the cul-de-sac — of a shared private driveway, which, when you expand the map, you can see services four properties.

Then zoom out on the map, and click on any of a labyrinth of short blue lines that don’t have street names, and you’ll find yourself down a long driveway, peering, if you’re so-minded, into the homes of people who may have presumed their location away from the street afforded them privacy.

What’s the issue here? Google’s on-the-ground 360-degree mapping service Street View has been available in New Zealand since 2009, allowing users to “walk” down streets to view the scene from a street-level vantage point.

It attracted controversy from the outset, but in consultation with the Privacy Commissioner, people’s faces were blurred to protect their identities.

Tech reporting at the time said Google had “gone to great lengths to safeguard privacy while allowing all New Zealanders to benefit from this feature”.

“Street View only contains imagery that is already visible from public roads,” a post on technology community Geekzone read.

So when did Google camera cars start driving down private driveways and recording 360-degree images of people sitting at their dining room tables? And are we OK with that?

Auckland man Bevan Jones isn’t.

Recently, when a friend of his used Google Maps and Street View to get to Jones’ house, on arrival he said, “You might want to look at this. This is not good.”

“It showed imaging all the way down my shared driveway, like down the side of my house and of my front yard,” says Jones. “I was pretty flabbergasted, to be quite honest. You don’t expect someone to trespass on your property and image everything they can in a 360-degree fashion.”

He’s fine with images being taken from the street, a la Street View’s name.

“But they have crossed the line between public and private property. They’ve come a significant distance onto our property and imaged everything.”

Jones filed a complaint to Google in an attempt to have the images removed.

“That kind of stagnated for almost a couple of weeks. And then I saw something online saying there’s another way. If you go into Google Maps, you can relabel what they define as a street.”

So he did, labelling his driveway as private property. “It removed all of the street view images with it.”

Is it back to front that an individual needs to make the point to a multinational company that their private driveway is not a public street?

“Yeah,” he says. “You’d think the onus would be on the company collecting the data to make sure they aren’t trespassing in order to collect it.”

Frith Tweedie, a director and principal at privacy consulting firm Simply Privacy, agrees.

“But that’s what we tend to see with Big Tech, isn’t it? That they make the moves they want to, all these sort of privacy incursions, and then individuals are left to try and pick up the pieces and fix things, when really it should be on them to be anticipating these kinds of issues.

“I think sometimes they get caught up in their visions and also what’s going to make them money, and they perhaps don’t always think about how those systems can be misused.”

Is it legally out of line, though? Tweedie explains that under the law it needs to be demonstrated not only that there’s been an interference with privacy, “but that some kind of harm has been caused”.

She zeroes in on one obvious area of concern. “[In cases of] domestic abuse or stalking where I might look at a blurred image and it means nothing to me, that could be information that’s of particular interest to people with bad intentions who could misuse that quite nastily.

“There is a genuine harm there, it’s not just someone saying, ‘I don’t really want to be in the image.’”

So how widespread is this Street View practice?

The first suburb I click on in Christchurch is Riccarton and I take a nice virtual stroll down the shared driveway of a bunch of townhouses.

But citywide it is harder to find examples than in Auckland.

It’s the same in Wellington: there are plenty there, but not on the scale of Tāmaki Makaurau.

However, for some reason in Nelson they’re everywhere.

Further virtual strolling in Auckland takes me down the long driveway of a Kāinga Ora property.

There are kids’ scooters in back yards. There are two men, one in a wheelchair, having a chat outside one of the homes.

A pile of shoes: his, hers, the kids’, on a front doorstep.

None of it particularly revealing. Or is it?

I sent it to Kāinga Ora and asked: Are you OK with this? A spokesperson replied that there had been no complaints, but it has now sought advice from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC).

Jones did that too, setting out what he believed to be Google’s trespass and invasion of his privacy.

He got no joy.

“Please note that the Privacy Act applies to personal information,” the OPC wrote, “which is information about an identifiable individual. Information about a property (such as a photo of your house) is not information that would be covered by the Act.”

But what about cases such as the woman in the pink sweatshirt with the red lovehearts, sitting privately, she probably thought, at her dining room table?

To be clear, this woman has not complained to Stuff; she may not even be aware she’s on the internet in the privacy of her own home.

But since it is publicly available, Stuff sent her image to the OPC and asked whether photographing people in their own homes from down a long driveway is a breach of privacy.

“The Privacy Act protects the personal information of all New Zealanders, which includes any information that can identify a person, like their address or their image,” said a spokesperson.

“From a privacy perspective the issue here is whether the filming was unduly intrusive? Principle 4 of the Act says that personal information must be collected in a way that’s lawful and fair and reasonable in the circumstances.”

Their advice?

“Because the imagery used in Street View is collected and held by Google, people should complain to Google first if they have a problem with it. That’s standard for all privacy complaints – people need to try and resolve it with the agency in question first.

“Another option is that they can use Google’s tool to report a problem. If you type your address into Google maps, click on Street View, scroll right to the bottom, and click Report a Problem — you can fill in a request to blur your home, car etc.”

Plenty of people couldn’t care less.

Becky Hart posted about it on Reddit in 2022, outraged that Google had driven down her driveway and taken photos of “our yard, our house and everything”.

Is this even legal, she asked?

“One neighbour is elderly and outside in her dressing gown and you can see into her yard … she’s basically naked!

“I’ve reported it, you all might want to do the same.”

But the reaction was not quite what she expected.

Sure, plenty of people shared her outrage, but plenty didn't.

“Most people don’t even have private driveways, we’re all out here getting pictures of the front of our homes/flats added to Street View whether we like it or not,” one wrote.

“It was probably done by mistake,” said someone else.

“They blur people,” said one more. “And Google maps cars are driven by bored young adults, they get confused sometimes about long driveways being public lanes. Do you have a sign saying private road?”, they asked.

In one exasperated response, Hunt replied: “Not a road, it's a private driveway. Yeah I've reported it. Still, that they're able to come down my driveway with cameras and throw the photos online is wild.

“I did not think I’d be arguing with people about why I want my privacy.”

All this time on, Hunt remains surprised that not only has the problem she identified back then persisted, it’s got worse.

After noticing her own issue, she started monitoring what was happening in the neighbourhood.

“You could see it expanding out, getting bigger and bigger.”

Hunt’s complaint to Google first resulted in her house being blurred, but that wasn’t enough for her. “I had to keep going back to them like I was the one in the wrong. ‘Excuse me, but blurring is not quite enough, can you remove it?”

“I’m a very private person,” she explains. “I see all this stuff happening, our privacy slowly getting taken away from us and I can’t help thinking about sci-fi novels.

“This is a company, not even a New Zealand company, it’s a foreign company, coming down my driveway taking photos of my house. Imagine if I came down your drive and walked around your house taking photos and put them on the internet. You’d be livid.”

To Hunt, it’s not just a theoretical breach or concern.

“I live in an area that has a lot of gang stuff happening. I’ve been a witness to crimes around here. I’m just a normal person. I don’t want my house or myself paparazzi’d by Google.

“They’ve taken an inch and then kept on taking some more. And people let it happen.”

So Stuff asked Google if it’s okay to do this. What does it consider its legal grounds for Street View drivers entering private property to take photos? How long has it been doing this?

Google asked for more context and examples, which we supplied.

And then a short statement arrived from a Google spokesperson.

'Street View drivers are trained to avoid private roads, but errors sometimes happen and these roads can be mistaken for narrow roads or alleys.

“We take privacy very seriously and are working quickly to remove this imagery.”

Which imagery is that, then? The links I provided? Or is a team about to start trawling Street View and one by one removing all the 360-degree photos taken down long driveways? It would need to be a big team: there are hundreds — probably thousands — of examples.

I seek clarification. How many of these “errors” are there? How long will it take to remove them?

By deadline, there had been no response.

I’ll watch keenly, though, because in the process of this reporting I found that my own home, down a long driveway, is on Street View for all to see.

I lodged a request for it to be removed.

“Thanks for submitting your Street View report,” the automated reply came. “We’re reviewing the image you reported and will email you when your request is resolved.”

That was a week ago. I’ve heard nothing since.