“Compensation payment of $12,500 for privacy breach on Google Street View”
What could you get for being embarrassed in public? How about U$12,500. An Argentine whose bare buttocks appeared in full, captured by a Google Street View camera and published on Google Maps, received that sum by decision of an Argentine court that determined that his privacy had been violated and his dignity harmed.
The man is a police officer who was naked in his garden in 2017 when a Google Street View car passed by. Although he was behind an almost two-meter fence, the camera captured him. Google usually blurs faces if they appear on camera, but it seems that buttocks are not censored, and the man was immortalized with his buttocks in the image, on the Internet, and could be easily identified by the name of his street and house number.
From mockery to justice: how Google and the courts reacted
According to the man, the situation humiliated him, exposed him to ridicule from his colleagues and neighbors, all because Google’s cameras were able to spy over his fence, which protected his private nudity from the prying eyes of humans with normal heights. According to the report, Google argued that the fence or wall was not high enough, technically true in the sense that it literally did not prevent the man from being photographed, although it is logical to assume that a wall is not built with 360-degree cameras mounted on cars that could pass by.
The man’s initial attempt to obtain compensation was rejected by a court that said he could not claim for damages and that he was the only one to blame for “walking in inappropriate conditions in his garden”. Let’s say the conclusion was not entirely wrong.
But the appeals court saw it from the man’s perspective and recognized that his privacy was violated with the photo. “It implies the image of a person who was not captured in a public space but within the confines of his home, behind a fence taller than the average person,” said the court, adding that the invasion of his privacy was “flagrant,” and that the whole situation was “an arbitrary intrusion into another person’s life.”
The court pointed out that Google usually blurs faces and license plates in the photos taken by its Street View cameras, so it is clear that they understand the potential harm they would incur if they published a photo of someone without their permission. So it seems somewhat strange that they did not blur the image of the naked man. “No one wants to be exposed to the world as the day they were born,” wrote the judges.
For the inconvenience, Google had to pay the man U$12,500, much more than the U$1 it paid to someone who accused the company of trespassing by taking photos of their private path, but much less than the amount paid in a joint lawsuit accusing the company of collecting personal information as part of its Street View project.
