No Google

Posted on June 1, 2008

You can look at almost anything on Google. Just don’t try to sneak a peek of the homes in the private community of North Oaks, Minnesota.
There has recently been a small furor over the faces being seen on Google’s Street View mapping, resulting in Google beginning to blur the faces of people along the way. Now the city of North Park and its 4,500 residents have demanded that Google Maps remove images of North Oaks homes from the website’s Street View feature, where any Internet user can glimpse a home from the nearest road.

North Oaks’ unique situation, in which the roads are privately owned by the residents and the city enforces a trespassing ordinance, may have made it the first city in the country to request that the online search engine remove images from Google Maps.

Since the introduction of Google Maps’ Street View last spring, the feature has caused controversy in several cities and with the federal government. The Pentagon banned Google Maps from taking any images of military facilities, and a Pittsburgh couple sued the company over images of their home taken from the private road in front of their house.

The North Oaks City Council sent a letter to Google in January asking the company to remove the images and destroy the files or possibly be cited for violating the trespassing ordinance.

Google said the images of North Oaks were removed shortly afterward. They also said they don’t know of any other city in the country that has made a similar request. The company receives a limited number of requests from individuals who don’t want their homes displayed on the website. All of these images are removed from public view and would never be sold, the spokesman said.