“Just give us your name, address, and more, and we’ll stop violating your privacy (on the surface). Training AI? Well, obviously. Selling to data brokers? I mean, why wouldn’t we? We’ll delete the document after we’ve stored all the details in our database, of course.”
Yeah this is exactly like the DNR (Do Not Track Request) built into browsers. It was off by default. Turning it on was only done by privacy focused individuals. But it made you significantly more trackable because almost nobody turns it on, your browser becomes a lot more unique.
Thankfully browsers stopped supporting it. But this is the same thing. Very few people will use it, so that it’ll make you stand out instead of helping you.
I read somewhere once that some houses are blurred after grisly murders occur there, among other heinous crimes like arson and rapes. That’s what I usually think of wwhen I see a blurred house. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a mansion blurred either.
Some people do live off the record. It’s somewhat inconvenient but far from impossible. A lot of people I know have their address off the record such that the government won’t have it on record, let alone a private company.
However, someone like that not only probably wouldn’t want to submit residency evidence to Google, they probably wouldn’t have utility bills or land registry documents etc that could prove residency. Therefore, they’d be outside the scope of this post.
One of the most pernicious cookies is the one that allows them to identify nearby devices. Even if you do not allow location specifically, consider exactly how much location data can be pieced together from that alone. It’s impossible to overestimate the amount of data they have on you.
Sorry - I meant “permission”, not cookie. If this is on (for Bluetooth headphones, sharing content, smart home etc) you could be leaking your location. If your partner shares their location, and you don’t - but you do allow your phone permission for nearby devices - your partners phone is revealing their own location, and their proximity to to you (your location). Third party cookies can be relevant for this because they allow browsers to identify/differentiate other users on the same network. If one user shares their location (or their location is known by the site they visited), then the other users on the networks location is also obtained.
IMO the same concept as Cris_Citrus makes here, applies when ppl say “your address was always in the phonebook”. Or how a film photo stuck in a drawer in Joe Sixpack’s house is different from a digital photo analyzed by sophisticated machine learning algorithms by dozens of data brokers to build a dossier of your life. Even if in both cases “someone could always take your picture in public.”
Scale, and ease of access, have real impacts. Even if technically, the data was “always available.”
False equivalences, all of 'em. But pro-surveilence advocates love making them.
The constitution people always love talking about the amendments like they’re gospel. But like, if the constitution was so great, why do you care about the changes to it? If we make a new amendment does it instantly become as sacred emotionally to them?
Your questions aren’t horrible and the do have actual answers. However, your tone suggest that you don’t actually give a fuck so it’s not worth wasting time answering them. Let me know if you were actually being genuine…
The en.wikipedia.org/…/First_Amendment_to_the_United_… is a part of the US Constitution that prohibits laws violating certain specific rights, two of them being the freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Many other countries have some equivalent to this too.
The relevance here is that taking photos of public spaces is part of freedom of speech and of the press.
Every days a school day and thankyou (no /s here) but as politely as possible I really don’t care about the US Constitution, even less it’s amendments.
Are you sure? You’d fit right in with a lot of proudly ignorant Americans… “Duh… I don’t know which I’ll proudly declare a badge of honor and commit to remaining stupid.”
I have enough things to learn, live and experience from a European perspective (as the culture and the language changes a shit load more than across the USA from geographical perspective)
I wouldn’t call you ignorant for not knowing information from some arcane document over x years old from a European country. Why am I ignorant not knowing it from your culture?
Exactly how does it have implications in a country it’s not a law of?
Because it had, and continues to have, a significant bearing on the development of technologies that are used internationally, many of which shape the society you live in.
Still, as long as companies, especially US-based ones like Google, are exporting their US-centric products & practices, people outside the US will be exposed to products & practices shaped by US law.
Because enforcement is rarely watertight, the above holds true even if the importing country’s laws forbid those products & practices.
Therefore, unless you wish to live in ignorance, it’s worth being aware of the laws that most strongly shape the technologies that in turn shape your society - even laws from jurisdictions outside your own.
…How? It’s made for the government not to take away rights. Like it’s bad, but it’s the bare minimum. It could be worse. There’s a 14th, 19th, first 10 amendments for a reason. I don’t like the US harming my privacy and the constitution, even though it takes a lot of effort to force, still prevents even more exploitation from happening…
No, it was made for the government not to take away the rights of rich property owners, slave owners, and traders. It took a couple centuries and a civil war to reform the Constitution to a somewhat reasonable state, and the Supreme Court keeps chipping away at every protection that has been applied to you and me. Law is class power.
Theres a little bit of a difference between doing away with the first amendment right to public photography and people using a massive corporation’s own take-down process for removing a publicly hosted images of their house 😅
You switched gears in the middle of your statement. Either photography from the public spaces is legal or it isn’t. The only reason I don’t consider these take-downs a first-amendment violation is because Google is providing the mechanism to do it. They legally have every right to take the picture of your house and tell you to go pound sand if you don’t like it.
I mean…. Sure. I’m not in disagreement with that. And people are welcome to not appreciate a corporation doing that, and use the takedown to remove it if they dont want it there
I do understand that Google can legally take pictures of whatever is public
It hurts Google, a tiny bit. If enough people do it, it starts to hurt a lot.
I doubt a block like þis prevents Google from training þeir DL machines on your house data, but it might prevent 3rd parties from getting pictures of your home from Google to train þeir’s wiþ.
It’s a legal, eþical means of corporate disobedience which works against þe commoditization of you. You care, because you don’t want to be a product, even if you don’t realize it.
in Old English, ⟨ð⟩ was used interchangeably with ⟨þ⟩ to represent the Old English dental fricative phoneme /θ/ or its allophone [ð], which exist in modern English as the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives both now spelled ⟨th⟩.
In Icelandic, sure. Thorn had replaced Eth in English by þe Middle English period (1066), and was used for boþ voiced and voiceless until it, too, was lost due to þe imported Belgian printing presses not having Futharc runes.
This should be opt-in, not opt out. IDGAF if it is public information that is perfectly viewable from the street, it shouldn’t be on the internet without my consent. There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to blur your house aside from the worry of petty thieves. One, your privacy should be treated with respect. Streisand Effect doesn’t really apply here because no one gives a shit if your house is blurred. No one cares as streetview passers by. Talk to your neighbors and then the whole street is blurred like my old street.
This does not obviate the need for action at the legislative level. Google has used the streetview cars to collect plates and radio signals including WiFi information, who knows what else. They have so many databases of information on each of us to sell to adverts and to give freely to police.
This opt out is a positive, likely carved out by litigation, in a very very negative space for privacy rights.
This opt out is a positive, likely carved out by litigation, in a very very negative space for privacy rights.
It’s not, it’s less than Google used to do for these requests. In 2009, I requested my house be taken off streetview. They removed it by skipping mine and a few houses on each side.
Then they went down my back lane, so everyone got a good look at my back yard anyway.
Privacy today is a never ending battle, but Google started this nonsense a long time ago.
“Just don’t be logged in” is not gonna be enough, if the device is the same as you normally use and you haven’t taken extra steps to make sure the device isn’t identifiable. I’d recommend doing this from a public library computer or similar public device.
Certainly, I didn’t think it was worth mentioning, don’t use the same browser when you have identifying cookies, try to change IP, and other biometric identifications
Someone on my street has done this and it completely fucks with street view for my own house, even though the blurred house is on a sheet running perpendicular to my street
I don’t understand why anyone would do this, if anything all it does is draw massive attention to the fact that someone wanted their house blurred.
It makes it harder to case the house though. If the street view shows a low overhang, with a easy way up to a second story window, or maybe a tree, A/C heat pump, all sorts of things, then I could see an argument for wanting that blurred.
When StreetView was introduced this dominated public debate in Germany for weeks. It was all the rage, “how dare they to photograph everything?”
One official even suggested “it’s awesome, police can now patrol the streets from an office chair”, because that is how much of a backwater country Germany is digitally.
Anyway, people saw immediately all the crime which all the criminal criminals would do with this tool (which tells you something about the state of mind of the “righteous folks”). Anyway, half the country was blurred, because everybody knew about it. And it is the reason, why StreetView is so patchy in Germany (or at least was for the longest time, didn’t check much in recent years) compared to the neighbouring states, 'cause Google pretty much said “Fuck these fucking Germans with their fucking shit”.
Apple came around some years later with their version, nobody cared anymore 😅
Im happy a lot of people care about privacy here in Germany. Thanks to that, we are few more steps away from the dystopian shitholes many other societies formed into.
not really, in Germany google street view never took off as everyone asked to be blurred, but then apple did it later and it worked. I’m not so sure what was my point here
What if they update the photos every 6 months or so? Would the photo then be unblurred and you gaave google your address for nothing? Or do they blur 3D coordinates?
I’m pretty sure google will still have your house number associated with your house. You’re just making it harder for people to be sure they’re at the right house when they show up there, like if you fell or choked on your meal and needed an ambulance.
This is why I prefer living a quarter mile up a private road. Just a few years in and already if I see a car I don’t recognize I stand from my rocking chair and a ask wifey to grab the gun.
No? It’s exaggeration certainly. But I’m one of two properties at the end if a long private road. If it’s a car I don’t recognize, I’m usually getting texts from the neighbors further up the road already about it. We’re on guard because there’s been a handful of meth head rural home invasions out here, and at least one time that’s exactly what we thwarted with a heated confrontation against some people claiming to be friends of my neighbors who were out of town.
“Google says the document is deleted after 60 days.”
Lol. They absolutely keep all of the data.
“Just give us your name, address, and more, and we’ll stop violating your privacy (on the surface). Training AI? Well, obviously. Selling to data brokers? I mean, why wouldn’t we? We’ll delete the document after we’ve stored all the details in our database, of course.”
Yeah, doesn’t say anything about copies being destroyed.
Now that I think about it, is that a threat? Is google going to come to my house and set all my documents on fire in 60 days?
The two counter arguments to this are:
You are giving more personal data to google to prove you live at that address.
A blurred house on street view makes you stand out and can make burglars think you are some rich guy with valuable stuff in their house.
Yeah, I was about to say, I’m not falling for this “privacy” service lol. Nice try, Google.
Yeah this is exactly like the DNR (Do Not Track Request) built into browsers. It was off by default. Turning it on was only done by privacy focused individuals. But it made you significantly more trackable because almost nobody turns it on, your browser becomes a lot more unique.
Thankfully browsers stopped supporting it. But this is the same thing. Very few people will use it, so that it’ll make you stand out instead of helping you.
I read somewhere once that some houses are blurred after grisly murders occur there, among other heinous crimes like arson and rapes. That’s what I usually think of wwhen I see a blurred house. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a mansion blurred either.
I’d rather my door be visible than tell google where I live.
Google already knows. They just don’t have a reason to check usually.
Google might or might not know where I live but if I send them a utility bill from my Google account then they definitely know where I live.
Google 100% knows where you live
if you integrate them into your life
[deleted]
Do they though? They aren’t some kind of god how would they know your if you don’t tell them your address or someone else tells them for you?
They might not know it.
But they would, if anyone with your name & address ever:
Some people do live off the record. It’s somewhat inconvenient but far from impossible. A lot of people I know have their address off the record such that the government won’t have it on record, let alone a private company.
Not gonna dispute that.
However, someone like that not only probably wouldn’t want to submit residency evidence to Google, they probably wouldn’t have utility bills or land registry documents etc that could prove residency. Therefore, they’d be outside the scope of this post.
this assumes that I have people I want to share my address with
If you live in the united states of genocide they probably do, anywhere else, maybe or maybe not
One of the most pernicious cookies is the one that allows them to identify nearby devices. Even if you do not allow location specifically, consider exactly how much location data can be pieced together from that alone. It’s impossible to overestimate the amount of data they have on you.
Tell me more about þis cookie. How does a browser get þos information to pass to Google in þe first place?
piss cookies, you say?
Sorry - I meant “permission”, not cookie. If this is on (for Bluetooth headphones, sharing content, smart home etc) you could be leaking your location. If your partner shares their location, and you don’t - but you do allow your phone permission for nearby devices - your partners phone is revealing their own location, and their proximity to to you (your location). Third party cookies can be relevant for this because they allow browsers to identify/differentiate other users on the same network. If one user shares their location (or their location is known by the site they visited), then the other users on the networks location is also obtained.
Is þis an Android þing? I don’t have þis on my Linux phone.
If you own your house, most states in the US publish a GIS map where that information is public.
If you read you’d have seen you can redact your name from the document
Google maps has a picture of my house from about 10 years before i moved in and it looks exactly like all the other houses around me…
…but i should give google personal information and utility bills to get it taken down?
Nah.
Right?
Everyone does know that the front of your house is visible from the street, right?
Yes, but with google maps it’s visible from anywhere. And some folks might prefer that it not be 🤷🏻♂️
IMO the same concept as Cris_Citrus makes here, applies when ppl say “your address was always in the phonebook”. Or how a film photo stuck in a drawer in Joe Sixpack’s house is different from a digital photo analyzed by sophisticated machine learning algorithms by dozens of data brokers to build a dossier of your life. Even if in both cases “someone could always take your picture in public.”
Scale, and ease of access, have real impacts. Even if technically, the data was “always available.”
False equivalences, all of 'em. But pro-surveilence advocates love making them.
Yes and some people would do away with the 1st amendment right to public photography entirely. That doesn’t make it right…
EDIT: Yes - my comment about 1st amendment only applies to U.S. I have no idea if other countries protect public photography in the same manner.
Not everyone’s in the US…
Fair - added a note to my comment. Thank you.
Good edit. Thankyou.
I’m not from the US so care little for the constitution. What is in the constitution and what is right are two different things.
Okay this one has always cracked me up.
The constitution people always love talking about the amendments like they’re gospel. But like, if the constitution was so great, why do you care about the changes to it? If we make a new amendment does it instantly become as sacred emotionally to them?
Your questions aren’t horrible and the do have actual answers. However, your tone suggest that you don’t actually give a fuck so it’s not worth wasting time answering them. Let me know if you were actually being genuine…
I omega don’t give a fuck, so good call! It was definitely rhetorical.
I think worshipping a 250 year old document is weird as heck.
Oh shit! I never knew we had access to the first amendment in Europe. (I also have no fucking idea what the first amendment is).
The en.wikipedia.org/…/First_Amendment_to_the_United_… is a part of the US Constitution that prohibits laws violating certain specific rights, two of them being the freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Many other countries have some equivalent to this too.
The relevance here is that taking photos of public spaces is part of freedom of speech and of the press.
Every days a school day and thankyou (no /s here) but as politely as possible I really don’t care about the US Constitution, even less it’s amendments.
Are you sure? You’d fit right in with a lot of proudly ignorant Americans… “Duh… I don’t know which I’ll proudly declare a badge of honor and commit to remaining stupid.”
Very sure thanks.
I have enough things to learn, live and experience from a European perspective (as the culture and the language changes a shit load more than across the USA from geographical perspective)
I wouldn’t call you ignorant for not knowing information from some arcane document over x years old from a European country. Why am I ignorant not knowing it from your culture?
Why not? I almost certainly would be ignorant about it. Ignorant just means I don’t know something… there’s all kinds of things that I don’t know.
The U.S. 1st amendment actually does have some implications for your speech even though you’re in Europe and (presumably) not a U.S. citizen.
Hahahaha. I think I laughed so much I dropped my French baguette from the London red bus im sitting in. /s.
Exactly how does it have have implications in a country it’s not a law of?
Because it had, and continues to have, a significant bearing on the development of technologies that are used internationally, many of which shape the society you live in.
So do the laws of China but I don’t know much of their laws. So also does the EU but I assume most yanks don’t know much about those ones either.
I don’t judge but I do get annoyed at USdefaultism
Getting annoyed is a form of judgement.
Yes, U.S. defaultism is problematic.
Still, as long as companies, especially US-based ones like Google, are exporting their US-centric products & practices, people outside the US will be exposed to products & practices shaped by US law.
Because enforcement is rarely watertight, the above holds true even if the importing country’s laws forbid those products & practices.
Therefore, unless you wish to live in ignorance, it’s worth being aware of the laws that most strongly shape the technologies that in turn shape your society - even laws from jurisdictions outside your own.
And which ones from China or the EU are you planning to investigate and learn about? It works both ways.
Not knowing the miniature of laws from other countries is not ignorance, there is only so much a person can learn and take in.
‘Getting annoyed is a form of judgment’ is an incredibly flipant response.
The US Constitution is fucking stupid.
…How? It’s made for the government not to take away rights. Like it’s bad, but it’s the bare minimum. It could be worse. There’s a 14th, 19th, first 10 amendments for a reason. I don’t like the US harming my privacy and the constitution, even though it takes a lot of effort to force, still prevents even more exploitation from happening…
No, it was made for the government not to take away the rights of rich property owners, slave owners, and traders. It took a couple centuries and a civil war to reform the Constitution to a somewhat reasonable state, and the Supreme Court keeps chipping away at every protection that has been applied to you and me. Law is class power.
Theres a little bit of a difference between doing away with the first amendment right to public photography and people using a massive corporation’s own take-down process for removing a publicly hosted images of their house 😅
You switched gears in the middle of your statement. Either photography from the public spaces is legal or it isn’t. The only reason I don’t consider these take-downs a first-amendment violation is because Google is providing the mechanism to do it. They legally have every right to take the picture of your house and tell you to go pound sand if you don’t like it.
I mean…. Sure. I’m not in disagreement with that. And people are welcome to not appreciate a corporation doing that, and use the takedown to remove it if they dont want it there
I do understand that Google can legally take pictures of whatever is public
don’t tell google where you live
If you use Maps, they already know.
Your DMV license is researchable so ?
i don’t use it much
So they know
they guess.
Tbh the outside of my home is publicly viewable anyway. I can’t think of why I’d care much.
It hurts Google, a tiny bit. If enough people do it, it starts to hurt a lot.
I doubt a block like þis prevents Google from training þeir DL machines on your house data, but it might prevent 3rd parties from getting pictures of your home from Google to train þeir’s wiþ.
It’s a legal, eþical means of corporate disobedience which works against þe commoditization of you. You care, because you don’t want to be a product, even if you don’t realize it.
You do realize the thorn is an actual letter and not completely equivalent to
theverywhere?The “th” in “with” is an eth, not a thorn.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth
As an aside, theirs is written without an apostrophe.
per Wikipedia:
In Icelandic, sure. Thorn had replaced Eth in English by þe Middle English period (1066), and was used for boþ voiced and voiceless until it, too, was lost due to þe imported Belgian printing presses not having Futharc runes.
Thanks for the correction and the history lesson! ♥️ I’m sorry for assuming I knew better than the thorn expert
Ha! I wasn’t before I started þis schtick. I’ve had to learn.
Lmao check his profile. þey’re doing god’s work
“permanant”
Brought to you by the same companies that “accidentally” re-add you to their spam lists.
Sadly it is permanent. Moved into a house that was blurred and wanted it unblurred. Sadly they have no process to do that.
Being the only blurred thing in the area seems a little conspicuous though
Streisand Effect here I come!
I just tell people I was out of focus when I was born, and doctors weren’t able to correct it.
Where’s the thorn on “Together”? Is it only used on nonquotes?
Oh, I don’t use it in quotes, like [sic]. I don’t change names, eiþer; Thomas stays Thomas. Just arbitrary rules I made up for myself when I started.
Do no do this, it will require more info to Google and make your house stick out like a sore thumb.
Feeding Google more data is always a good idea…
This should be opt-in, not opt out. IDGAF if it is public information that is perfectly viewable from the street, it shouldn’t be on the internet without my consent. There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to blur your house aside from the worry of petty thieves. One, your privacy should be treated with respect. Streisand Effect doesn’t really apply here because no one gives a shit if your house is blurred. No one cares as streetview passers by. Talk to your neighbors and then the whole street is blurred like my old street.
This does not obviate the need for action at the legislative level. Google has used the streetview cars to collect plates and radio signals including WiFi information, who knows what else. They have so many databases of information on each of us to sell to adverts and to give freely to police.
This opt out is a positive, likely carved out by litigation, in a very very negative space for privacy rights.
It’s not, it’s less than Google used to do for these requests. In 2009, I requested my house be taken off streetview. They removed it by skipping mine and a few houses on each side.
Then they went down my back lane, so everyone got a good look at my back yard anyway.
Privacy today is a never ending battle, but Google started this nonsense a long time ago.
No disagreement. Like I said, privacy rights are not in a good place. 🤷
Hey now, no need to bash wfh!
But now your making yourself more obvious, and you need to tell google your address. Is it really worth it?
You can blur your name on the proof document. Just don’t be logged in
“Just don’t be logged in” is not gonna be enough, if the device is the same as you normally use and you haven’t taken extra steps to make sure the device isn’t identifiable. I’d recommend doing this from a public library computer or similar public device.
Doing it on tor would work.
Certainly, I didn’t think it was worth mentioning, don’t use the same browser when you have identifying cookies, try to change IP, and other biometric identifications
So, couldn’t you just send a bunch of these for everyone’s house atp if you can blur identification?
Sure but you need a document showing the address
This is such a backwards-ass way to do things. I built my house using extra large bricks so it would be pixelated to begin with
So now they know where you live…
Lol as i am going to send google extra information to get a bit more privacy back. Thata stupid
Someone on my street has done this and it completely fucks with street view for my own house, even though the blurred house is on a sheet running perpendicular to my street
I don’t understand why anyone would do this, if anything all it does is draw massive attention to the fact that someone wanted their house blurred.
What is funny about the house that did it on my street move down one jump and look back and it isn’t blurred.
This does nothing but make your house more obvious. It’s better to blend in than to stick out.
It makes it harder to case the house though. If the street view shows a low overhang, with a easy way up to a second story window, or maybe a tree, A/C heat pump, all sorts of things, then I could see an argument for wanting that blurred.
😅. Okay, story time:
When StreetView was introduced this dominated public debate in Germany for weeks. It was all the rage, “how dare they to photograph everything?”
One official even suggested “it’s awesome, police can now patrol the streets from an office chair”, because that is how much of a backwater country Germany is digitally.
Anyway, people saw immediately all the crime which all the criminal criminals would do with this tool (which tells you something about the state of mind of the “righteous folks”). Anyway, half the country was blurred, because everybody knew about it. And it is the reason, why StreetView is so patchy in Germany (or at least was for the longest time, didn’t check much in recent years) compared to the neighbouring states, 'cause Google pretty much said “Fuck these fucking Germans with their fucking shit”.
Apple came around some years later with their version, nobody cared anymore 😅
Im happy a lot of people care about privacy here in Germany. Thanks to that, we are few more steps away from the dystopian shitholes many other societies formed into.
Streisand time
not really, in Germany google street view never took off as everyone asked to be blurred, but then apple did it later and it worked. I’m not so sure what was my point here
Man I specifically looked in the comments for the link to that page and couldn’t find it and then posted it myself.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Damn, they’ll have to go all the way to zillow if they wanna case your place, huh?
Will this work for an apartment building? I’m about to find out
Okay i did shots from maybe 8 angles, this is the time it took including scanning the waterbill on my fridge, wish me luck
you cant even see my apartment from the street 😈
Ive moved house so many times the last five years, i didnt know this was so easy
Blur your house on google maps
Anyone going to try this with the Whitehouse?
LMAO
What if they update the photos every 6 months or so? Would the photo then be unblurred and you gaave google your address for nothing? Or do they blur 3D coordinates?
So Google takes new photos periodically. We use them for legal evidence.
Also, burglars are using Google maps? That’s funny.
I just took my house numbers off the house, may not be much but works for me
I hope you never have a fall or choke on your meal….that’s a really bad idea.
There on the mail box you just can’t see it from the street easily, I live in a suburb it’s pretty easy to figure it out
Then what are you accomplishing?
Not having my address viewable from google Maps
I’m pretty sure google will still have your house number associated with your house. You’re just making it harder for people to be sure they’re at the right house when they show up there, like if you fell or choked on your meal and needed an ambulance.
how hard would it be to just do this automatically for every address? to bring down the street view machine for good?
I’m not suggesting anyone do this, I am just curious how it would work or how it would play out.
Bigfoot uses this
This is why I prefer living a quarter mile up a private road. Just a few years in and already if I see a car I don’t recognize I stand from my rocking chair and a ask wifey to grab the gun.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kaylin_Gillis
That’s how you get things like this.
This has to be satire. Right?
No? It’s exaggeration certainly. But I’m one of two properties at the end if a long private road. If it’s a car I don’t recognize, I’m usually getting texts from the neighbors further up the road already about it. We’re on guard because there’s been a handful of meth head rural home invasions out here, and at least one time that’s exactly what we thwarted with a heated confrontation against some people claiming to be friends of my neighbors who were out of town.