(I couldn’t resist.)
Mr. and Ms. Boring of Pittsburgh is suing Google for intentional invasion of privacy since Google’s Street View feature shows a picture of the home despite the fact that their street is marked as a private road. The Smoking Gun has the facts and their pleadings:
of the Boring property, which is now even easier to locate via Google Maps, since the plaintiffs included their home address on the lawsuit’s first page. And while they are litigating, perhaps the Borings should consider suing Allegheny County’s Office of Property Assessments, which includes a photo of their home (which was built in 1916 and sits on 1.82 acres) on its web site. , to help people learn about imagery removal and an easy-to-use process to facilitate image removal.As a matter of policy, imagery for Street View is taken in public streets and what any person can readily capture or see in the public domain. Street View is a popular, engaging feature that allows people to easily find, discover, and plan activities relevant to a location.
What’s most interesting — at least from my perspective — is that this argument doesn’t hold much water in Canada. Up here, there are two different privacy laws. There is some caselaw that’s similar to tort law in the US suggesting that you can sue for invasion of privacy, if there’s been an “unreasonable invasion of privacy”. In the US, there is no expectation of privacy in the streets or in a public place and, other than in Quebec, that’s probably the law in Canada. The second law is PIPEDA, which is a separate statute that governs all collection, use and disclosure of personal information in connection with commercial activity. Since Google’s doing commercial activity, the law requires consent for the collection and disclosure of personal information. (There’s some serious doubt that the photo of your house without any other information would be your personal information.) Since street view often includes photos of people, Google would require consent to use those photos for commercial purposes. Since the Google street sweepers do not get consent, there’s no easy way to have street view in Canada.
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