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Judge Dismisses Google Street View Case
angry tapir writes "A judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Pennsylvania family against Google after the company took and posted images of the outside of their house in its Maps service. The lawsuit, filed in April 2008, drew attention because it sought to challenge Google's right to take street-level photos for its Maps' Street View feature. Judge Amy Reynolds Hay from the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania granted Google's request for dismissing the lawsuit because 'the plaintiffs have failed to state a claim under any count.'"
My favorite Google Street View story: Google Maps Car Hits Deer.
Just like the settlement it reached with book authors, Google could give $66 to each homeowner photographed by StreetView. We could call that agreement the Google stimulus package :-)
There is a serious discussion to be had about privacy rights and Google's objective to picture, reference and catalog everything. Some inside Google take the "do no evil" to heart. Street View blurs faces and license plates.
Good, but I wish it didn't have to be voluntary. We know what voluntary compliance by various industries lead to. That's why privacy laws have to set clear boundaries. In the dismissed lawsuit, note that the Google driver did enter a private road by mistake. Mistakes in sensitive privacy situations can be very damaging.
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Was that because they were too Boring?
Anonymous Coward
I agree that mistakes in sensitive privacy situations can be damaging. But this particular plaintiff, the court found, failed to show that it was damaging in their situation, which is the requirement to sue for damages. They claimed they suffered $25,000 in emotional anguish, and the court held that they didn't provide any plausible legal arguments to support that damage claim.
If we do think, as a matter of public policy, that even harmless violations should be penalized in order to discourage them, there's a way to do that: pass a law that establishes a fine for such violations. The fine, of course, should go to the government, not the plaintiff, unless the plaintiff actually was harmed. Public policy via, you know, actual laws and law enforcement, not ambulance-chasing lawyers and "mental-anguish"-inventing plaintiffs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Most of the time when you see someone standing in the street taking pictures of your house, they are real estate appraisers shooting photos of the comparables for their report. They're usually harmless. Either that or your wife is up on the roof naked again.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
If only common sense reigned, this would be so. See ASMP's page on photographing public buildings; not every building is impacted, but I've seen cases where museums and the like claimed that the architecture of the building itself constitutes a work of art, and that photography of the same was forbidden.
Some background on the law in the USA.
US law defines areas of private property in two different ways. There are true "private" areas, such as the inside of your home, and semi-public areas, called "curtilage." There's a sliding range of protection in each category, but we'll save that for another time.
Curtilage is your driveway, sidewalks leading up to your door, the treelawn, and possibly other areas immediately surrounding your house. Curtilage is basically any area where is is reasonable or expected for other people to enter. The reason there is a sidewalk leading to your front door is because you expect to use that door and you want people to use that path, instead of tramping across your lawn.
You can curb the expected curtilage rights to varying degrees by posting "Do Not Enter" signs, fencing in your yard, gating your driveway, etc. Otherwise the default is "anyone can enter," for reasonable/expected use.
Interestingly, anything the Police can observe inside the private areas of your property from the curtilage is fair game, in terms of not needing a warrant to enter. I.e., the police come to your front door and see [what reasonably appears to be] a kilo of cocaine, they can enter your house [at least as far as the room with the cocaine.]
Furthermore, at that point many jurisdictions would allow a brief search of the house in the name of officer safety too, to make sure there aren't any folks with weapons lurking. And anything illegal that is in plain sight can be seized. More than that, they do need a warrant, but it's a slippery slope. The moral is to hide your bad stuff in the first place.
I wandered a little off topic, but it calls for interesting analogies in the digital realm. What information that you send/receive is "private" and why/why not.
is that the couple requested Google remove photos of the home which Google complied. Yet the couple still claimed "damages"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Totally reasonable. After all, tons of psychos dare the police to catch them before their crimes by doing daylight stakeouts of their potential victims. They always take a ton of photos of the outsides of the houses, it really turns them on or something.
But what you can be sure of is that it wasn't an architecture or art student, a real-estate photographer, a private investigator looking for someone else, bird-watcher checking out the birds in the chimney, or anything harmless.
Certainly it's a danger to your family. Your kids. They're the cutest ones in the whole world and it's amazing psychos haven't found them yet. Act quickly to ensure this breach is rectified.
Remember, for safety, never let anyone photograph your children. In fact, any men (and 10% of women) who see them will likely be driven to extremes of lust - prepare for group attacks where an entire mob tries to seize your children.
Seriously! If you aren't panicking you don't love your children!