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Woman Sues Google Over Street View Shots of Her Underwear
Kittenman writes "The Telegraph (and several US locals) are covering a story about a Japanese woman who had her underwear on the line while the Google car went past. She is now suing Google: 'I was overwhelmed with anxiety that I might be the target of a sex crime,' the woman told a district court. 'It caused me to lose my job and I had to change my residence.'"
I'm not aware of the laws outside the US, but that line is loaded. In the US, sexual harassment is the only crime that is judged by, not on the intention of the accused, but the perception of the accuser. There is the allowance for a measure of common sense when asking "would a reasonable, normal person be offended in this way" which is introduced, but no company is going through a sex crimes trial before settling. It just isn't happening. Can someone comment as to these laws in Japan?
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
It seems hard to imagine that the woman expected her delicates to stay completely private when she hung them up for the entire world to see.
This is the part that really stands out. What makes you think she hung them up "for the entire world to see"? I mean, what we have today is kind of a whole new level in the public vs. private continuum. There's "private". Then there's "public". But then there's "on the Internet", which is a whole different ball of wax.
There is a shift that needs to happen in how we view things. Obviously, the moment you step out of a private residence, you can no longer expect privacy. But perhaps there is a reasonable expectation of something that falls somewhere between "private" and "on the Internet".
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
In Japan, where streets are small and houses close, people are very used to not looking and not seeing things plainly visible from the street. It would be really rude to stare, and it isn't done.
If the fact that it’s airing up there visible for the world to see doesn’t mean that anybody should be staring at it, neither does the fact that it’s visible on Google Street View.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
we'll talk again next time you get playful with your significant other in a secluded, but public, spot. or in your living room without the drapes drawn.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
You *do* close the blinds before having sex, don't you?
But the real issue is that people are too hung up over this in the U.S. If such an incident happened to most normal people in the rest of the world, they would simply take better precautions and move on with their life. Going into a panic over it to the point where you get paranoid and dysfunctional is the wrong way to handle the problem. Also, there would be less of an issue with stalkers and so on if the U.S. wasn't so anally obsessed with maintaining a pseudo-1950s ideal of purity about the human body. I mean, as it was pointed out a couple of days ago here, you can show someone's head being exploded in a PG movie but you show a little too much skin and you're looking at a R rating.
ie - most of the rest of the industrialized world doesn't generally have to worry as much about such issues because sex and the body in media is far more accessible. So there's less of a psychological issue amongst the society because they can easily and simply get their porn or whatever as they need to. You'll note that the most sexually repressed societies are also amongst the most violent, especially in terms of assaults and rape.
Of course, this is barely being touched upon in modern Psychology. The idea that high incidents of rape and physical assault are a result of societal issues and a dysfunctional environment between the sexes and people's views of themselves and their bodies.
Some interesting reading:
http://www.ipce.info/library_2/pdf/prescott_en.pdf (perhaps the first study of its kind, though largely ignored in the U.S. until recently)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1981.tb01068.x/abstract - This is extremely recent and a (long overdue) logical progression of the hypothesis, IMO.
The book "An Interview with The Devil" also has a coupe of great passages in it about this. Though it's mostly tongue-in-cheek humor, there is a valid point to be made about how people who are less able to show affection and obtain closeness with others end up being more violent. You'll note that the U.S. is even worse off than ever before and we also at the same time can't even hug each other or touch each other in public/school/work/etc without fear of being charged with a crime.
It would be interesting to do a study on sexual and physical repression in terms of the collapse of great empires throughout history. I suspect that the results might be quite interesting.