Google Sued Over Privacy Invasion On Street View 481
mikkl666 writes "A couple from Pittsburgh has sued Google because a photo of their house appeared on Google Street View. They are demanding in excess of $25,000 to make up for the 'mental suffering' and the diminished value of their home. Their street is apparently marked with a 'Private Road' sign, and they claim that putting a photo of their property online is an 'intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion' of their privacy. Google, on the other hand, claims that this lawsuit is pointless since anyone can ask them to have pictures removed without legal action. We've previously discussed some of the privacy concerns surrounding Street View."
lol.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I just love it when people grab any occasion to try to sue as much money as they can from large (and rich) companies, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. A chance these companies also have dozens of lawyers for whenever that happens.
Re:I don't like that defense (Score:1, Insightful)
asking someone for permission should happen BEFORE acting
Yeah, that is just so feasible when what you're doing is taking pictures of EVERY SINGLE BUILDING AND HOUSE IN A LARGE CITY. Well maybe not every single one, but you get my point..
Opt out? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you google! (Score:3, Insightful)
How long until google is indexing my underwear drawer?
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't like that defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, doing shit like this only makes it worse [wikipedia.org]. If there really was any concern over privacy then this is by far the worst thing you could do to protect it.
Third, I would love so hear how taking pictures of a property devalues it. At best you can charge them with trespassing since it was private property - a criminal charge which would probably be more effective at changing Google's policies than a civil suit - but you can't get any cash out of a criminal charge.
In other words, this has all the seemings of someone who decided to look up their own house on Street View and thought "free money!"
=Smidge=
Re:I warned them (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should they have listened to you?
Perhaps because he was right, and the alternative was continuing to live in denial of the idea that anything Google does could possibly be wrong? Just read Google's view of the subject:
Google, on the other hand, claims that this lawsuit is pointless since anyone can ask them to have pictures removed without legal action.
Sure, but I bet they wouldn't have volunteered any compensation or accepted any penalty in recognition of the fact that they did do something wrong.
Google have become far too big for their boots in recent years. They need to be taught the meaning of respecting people's privacy, and now they're a shareholder-driven company, the most effective way to do that is to penalise them financially. If everyone who finds Google's Street View is unreasonably invading their privacy gets awarded a substantial sum of money then Google will learn that this behaviour is not acceptable and stop doing it. (Failing that, we should start locking up their directors, but obviously it's not likely to come to that.)
Personally, I believe any photograph taken without permission that looks into someone's home is an invasion of privacy. This is not at all the same situation as a neighbour casually passing by in the street, where no-one is both recording what they see and republishing it for the rest of the world in searchable form. Right now, a lot of our laws on things like privacy and data protection are well behind the curve in terms of technology. I can only hope that publicising a few more cases like Simon Bunce [bbc.co.uk], where someone's entire life is wrecked because one leak of personal data snowballed into identity theft and all that implies, will wake up governments to the fact that big business's need to spam us all with advertising and keep our credit card numbers on file for... well, because they couldn't be bothered not to... is not more important then your right and mine to live a private life free from unwarranted scrutiny by all and sundry.
Personally, I hope the complainant gets the $25k in this case, not because I necessarily believe they suffered as much as their claims suggest, but because I think it would be healthy to have such a damaging precedent on file as a deterrent to Google and anyone else who thinks that just because they can collect and process vast amounts of data that means they have no ethical or legal obligations on how they do so.
Diminshed Value? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I don't like that defense (Score:5, Insightful)
"There is no damage".
Boom. End of sentence. I would say there is no expectation of privacy from outer space or from the street. It's not reasonable.
As for "Mental Anguish", I suffer a lot of mental anguish every day that I'm in traffic. Who do I sue? And only $25K for mental anguish. Either they didn't have a lot of anguish or they don't have a lot of mental.
As for the diminished value of their house, it sounds like they're looking for Google to reimburse them for the downturn in the market that has cut housing values from 1/4 to 3/4's (depending on where you live).
Overall, this is the kind of lawsuit that makes you think the world is overpopulated. On so many levels.
Re:I don't like that defense (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't like that defense (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't like that defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:5, Insightful)
~Dan
Re:I warned them (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I warned them (Score:3, Insightful)
It sort of reminds me of the idea, "hey I will walk along the neighborhood and attempt to open all doors and see which ones are unlocked. Of course if you tell me after the fact then I will not do it again later on."
So why does Google do this? Simple, its their entire business model. Think about. Imagine if Google had to get the OK from everybody before submitting pictures, web search, and book contents. That would absolutely kill their revenue.
Re:I warned them (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but you are spectacularly missing my point.
I do have an expectation of privacy in my own home. This expectation is born of common courtesy and acceptable polite behaviour. Moreover, I claim that I am far from the only person with such a view: if you walked along a street obviously going up to people's windows and taking detailed photographs of the inside of their home, do you not think a substantial number of them would also have a problem with this behaviour? The fact that Google is doing this far more disceetly does not change the nature of what they are doing, nor the feelings many people would have about it if they knew it was going on.
You are in essence making a legal argument: the law does not currently prohibit such abusive behaviour. I am making an ethical one: if that is so, then the law is broken.
Re:I don't like that defense (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I warned them (Score:4, Insightful)
And there is no equivalent to remove your house from their satellite stuff if you so desire.
Not unless you are, say, the US Government, that is. Apparently their right to privacy extends to not having photographs of their facilities publicly available.
There should be a constitutional rule that says no government or corporate body may ever have a right not universally available to an individual citizen. If something is important enough for the guys with power and money to protect, it's important enough to protect it for everyone else, too.
Re:I warned them (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it is a reasonable assumption that you told the legal and technical teams that actually work on Google Streets anything . You certainly tried to tell them something - but that message getting to anyone who could act on it is probably vanishingly small.
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:5, Insightful)
Darwin Effect of 'Diminished Value' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I warned them (Score:2, Insightful)
In this case Google is doing neither, using a standard lens to take a picture of buildings and streets is hardly a problem, sure using zoom lenses and stuff or walking up to windows to get detailed pictures of people inside their homes would be.
By your definition taking photos of buildings in general would be a crime if there were any people inside said buildings, there is the whole thing of wanting to take photos of the architecture, not to mention the obvious problem of telling people they can't take pictures of their friends ANYWHERE in an urban area as they would also capture shots of buildings, and thus probably people inside those buildings or are people wanting to take photographs supposed to peer into the buildings first to make sure no people are visible?
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank goodness for that, I thought it might be a problem.
Re:I don't like that defense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Public Records (Score:3, Insightful)
Views from the *street* are public. Don't like it, move further back from the road and put up trees. ( and put a cover over your property or move underground since satellite images are public too, since i could see that same view from the street, with a REALLY large ladder. )
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More pinheads who don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
(2) Others have posted that there are no signs visible indicating that this named road is private, or that trespassing is prohibited. It is entirely likely (though I don't know for certain) that there is, in fact, a public right of way centered on the road. That is often the case in Virginia even when the road is listed as private.
(3) They must be going fucking bonkers over their county's GIS website, which lists data on the property and sales price information.
I'm more libertarian than the average Joe, but I have a very hard time getting worked up over this. Get back to me if they start tracking people movements without consent...I'll back you up at that point.
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm all for not having an expectation of privacy in public areas, but that area clearly isn't public.
Re:I don't like that defense (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I warned them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:3, Insightful)
They'll lose the case because there isn't a reasonable expectation of privacy to claim. Law enforcement and emergency vehicles are legally allowed on all of those roads as necessary, and so are other people. If they had a gate or barrier then they might have a case, but as it is now they're basically just invoking the Streisand effect.
Living in a low traffic area isn't sufficient to give that expectation from the legal point of view. The open fields doctrine would be completely pointless otherwise.
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I warned them (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus, you basically gave a group think answer to a question aimed at exploring your creativity.
Re:I plan to sue (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure Google will remove the photos And when Microsoft, Yahoo, and Verifax start doing the same, you're supposed to click their link to remove even though they never inform you that you've been added to their database? Some of us value our privacy but don't consider it our onus to have to spend time searching for people trying to breach our privacy. Some would compare this to web indexing, but it's not at all alike because of the robot exclusion standard. If I don't want someone to index my website, I place a file that says such, and if they do they're likely breaking the law.
But why should I care? Anyone can see my house right?? and that's fine, the problem comes when they stick it in a database. I actually expected better from slashdot in regard to this. We all know about datamining, all these different sources that can be used to gather information and make larger conclusions. The idiots that put pictures of themselves on Facebook doing drugs or underage drinking have only themselves to blame. But what about the people that get their photo snapped in some place they shouldn't be. If I had a moral agenda to push it wouldn't be hard to search out pictures of all "undesirable" places (strip clubs, gay bars, etc) to identify people and contact their employers. Plus this is just the start, do you think google will be the only company to ever want to do this? Do you think they'll stop after one picture, no they need to update their content.
Suppose something really bad is placed on internet, like a woman leaving her blinds open while undressing. She'll only find out when someone sees it, by then it's likely out of googles hands and posted on forums all over the place. Should google be responsible?
But the robots exclusion standard CAN'T work with real world information. Suppose we say we can opt-out of all databases. how do we do that? Place our facial information in a file so if we match a photo it's rejected, placing our facial information in everyones database in the process?! Or register our house and just acecpt that people can search for where we go?
What I think google should do if they want to be respectful of people is send out notices to all residents when they take photos of their block. Give them 30 days to opt out before the photos are placed online. This won't happen not just because it'd raise costs, but because they'd find every block has at least one person opposed. Plus they should blur our any people, license plates and other identifiable information in photos
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if the road itself is totally owned by the landowner, whether they have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" from photographs on that road is a question that is probably undecided or unclear. Even if the answer is yes, the issue of damages is probably laughable. A generic photo of a house on a road? I'd give them $100. If the photo had a picture of them "doing it" in the window, maybe $25,000 would be justifiable.
If you want to read more, check out this link: The Pennsylvania Legislatorâ€(TM)s Municipal Deskbook, Third Edition (2006), Road Law Basics Chapter: http://tinyurl.com/6hvvnk
Re:Diminished Value? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I warned them (Score:3, Insightful)