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My generation has really taken to heart the old adage "It's easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission". Just another symptom of our society's growing sense of entitlement and disrespect of others' personal property and privacy.

Photography in the US is permitted in public places, and does not require permission in advance. From The Photographer's Bill of Rights [krages.com]:

The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. Absent a specific legal prohibition such as a statute or ordinance, you are legally entitled to take photographs. Examples of places that are traditionally considered public are streets, sidewalks, and public parks.

Google is going above and beyond by offering to remove any objected photos, at their expense, and without the need to raise legal action.

Roads are considered public places. I don't know whether roads marked as private are considered public or not (it takes more than the posting of a sign to make something so), this probably depends on the municipality, and whether or not the road itself is actually private property (and as such they'd have to pay themselves for plowing and other maintenance). In that case, Google's mistake might have simply for their driver to have failed to notice the sign labeling it as private. In such a case, I think you'd have to prove Google knowingly and willingly chose to act in the face of knowledge that what they did was incorrect. Because this is such an unusual circumstance (very very few roads are private which don't have some sort of gate on the end) that the burden should be on the owners to protect themselves from unwitting violation of their atypical case.

Regardless, these people are exposing themselves to a serious Streisand Effect [wikipedia.org] by trying to make such a public issue of the complaint. If instead they had emailed Google and requested the removal, Google would have quietly complied, and no one would have even noticed. Guaranteed, if they see other people looking at their home as a way to devalue it (which I cannot see), then any publicity they generate for themselves will be far more damaging than the mere existence of an image mixed in among millions of others.