For Google Places Experts

A couple of weeks ago, some news was released about a change in Google's policy on showing/hiding adresses for service businesses.

As I understood it, Google now prefers for you to hide the address of the business if it generally performs it's work at the customer's location as opposed to at the business location. In the place of your address you will apply a "service radius."

After closer examination, I came to the conclusion that most customers want to see the address due to things such as determining how close the business is to them (speed of arrival and travel cost) and if the business is actually in their specific town.

Small business owners that work from home like the idea of hiding their address as it keeps their home address private and they do not have to go to the expense of getting a mail drop address for their business which as I understand it isn't even "allowed" by Google anyway although some still do it.

My question is:

Are any of you now hiding the addresses for all your service clients? I have gone in and hidden the addresses for a couple of mine just to test and while I haven't seen any change in the rankings I have noticed that no one else in any of the catagories I have checked are hiding their addresses.

What are your thoughts on this?

If hiding the address is now Google's preferred way to do things will they not penalize you if you do not do this going forward?

Thanks for any and all ideas and thoughts.