bluman

Camouflage netting is perhaps the only surefire way to do this, although I'm sure that will attract far more attention than doing nothing at all. Something that would work kind of OK would be to create a large radiometric difference in your property like having a dark black roof and making your lawn as reflective as possible (white cement or gravel, swimming pool). That way when the imagery is processed in an automated fashion it will render your area badly. It still would be possible to go back to the original images and enhance the area manually but can be quite a chore.

Effectively the resolution of commercial satellite imagery will be changing from 50cm to 40cm and then 25cm later this summer when WorldView-3 is online. This is vastly less commercial aerial photography which has been around 15cm for the last decade and increasingly around 7cm at affordable costs. I don't believe that satellite imagery will be getting much better due to quantum diffraction.

I'm not saying that this isn't a privacy issue it's just that the situation hasn't gotten appreciably worse because of this announcement.

In the specific example of the elevation data set, the data for the United States looks like it's public domain (USGS DEMs). The rest of the world may be more difficult to get high resolution but there is STRM which is reasonable ok for a lot of uses.

Speaking as a GIS analyst it looks like a large part of their problems are bad cartography followed by incorrect assumptions or spotty analysis of their vendor's data. I don't see how hiring more programmers will fix those issues.