Privacy and 3D tours: what gets captured, what to blur

Angles. A listing photo is one framing, chosen by someone who could crop out the family photos on the piano. A splat is reconstructed from hundreds of frames and can be viewed from positions no photo was taken from. The visitor can walk up to the bookshelf and read the spines, look down at the desk, turn to see what was behind the photographer.

It also captures the relationship between things: which window faces which building, where the safe is relative to the closet, how the back door connects to the lane. None of that is secret in a showing. It is more exposed in a tour, because a tour is public and permanent.

A short list, in order of how often it is missed:

• Paper. Mail on the counter, documents on a desk, a calendar with appointments, a whiteboard. Anything with a name, an address, or a date.
• Screens. Computers, tablets, and TVs. Turn them off; a dark screen is also better for the reconstruction.
• Photos of people, especially children. Take them down or turn them face-in.
• Keys, lockboxes, alarm panels, door codes, and the router label with the Wi-Fi password.
• Medication and anything medical.
• Valuables that you would rather a stranger did not know the location of.
• Pets and people. They move, which both reconstructs badly and raises its own consent questions.

For an occupied home, this is a conversation with the seller or tenant before the walk, not after. For a vacant unit it is mostly moot.

Not on a splat in any practical way today. Blurring a video frame does not remove the object from the reconstruction; it feeds the solver a smeared version from one angle while other frames show it clearly. Editing the splat itself to remove a region is possible with specialist tools, but it is slow, manual, and leaves a visible hole.

VOLUME does not offer automatic face or object blurring. The honest advice is prevention: remove the item, cover it, or do not point the camera at it. If something sensitive makes it into a published tour, archive the tour and reshoot. A reshoot is a few minutes; a published tour is permanent until you take it down.

Anyone with the link, by default. That is the point of a listing tour. If you want to limit it:

• Unbranded link removes your identity from the tour, not the property's.
• Password protection on VOLUME puts a password prompt in front of the tour page, so only people you have sent the password can walk it. Useful for pre-market previews and private rentals.
• Archiving takes the tour offline. The link stops resolving. The file stays in your account.
• Deleting the tour removes the file and the poster from storage.

Note that the tour does not have to be in the MLS to be findable. A public tour page can be indexed by search engines. If a property should not be publicly associated with a tour, password it or keep it archived until listing day.

This varies by vendor and is worth asking. The reasonable standard: a tour page should measure aggregate behaviour (how many visits, how long, from what kind of device) without identifying the visitor, and should not drop third-party advertising trackers onto a buyer who clicked an MLS link.

VOLUME's tour pages record a random session identifier generated in the browser, the tour slug, dwell buckets, device class, and coarse region derived from the edge network. No name, no email, no cross-site tracking. A visitor who submits the lead form gives their contact details deliberately, and those go to the tour's owner. The privacy policy has the formal version.