Google's Street View Upsets Privacy Advocates

Google's new Street View service, which allows users to pull up street-level, 360-degree photos of addresses in major urban areas, is cool and more than a little creepy, but is it legal?

The Web site's high-tech photo vans have captured and posted shots of a pair of scantily clad sunbathers on Stanford's campus, a man entering an adult bookstore, and a woman's thong underwear being exposed as she climbed into a truck.

Privacy advocates are in an uproar over the service, but Google and its defenders have declared confidently that the firm is in the clear because anyone has the right to publish photos taken from public streets.

"The images in Street View are lawful. The Street View feature only contains imagery gathered on public property," a spokeswoman for Google, Megan Quinn, said in a statement sent by e-mail to the Sun. "This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street."

Legal experts say there is no hard-and-fast legal rule that blesses all public photography. "Privacy laws vary from state to state, but there have been instances where legal liability was found even for photos taken in public," an attorney urging changes to Street View, Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.

Usually, people doing things in public, even foolish or embarrassing things, are deemed to have waived their privacy rights. The situation becomes more complicated, though, when a person is put in an embarrassing position through no fault of his or her own. Crime or accident victims often feel violated by news photos, but courts almost always throw out suits over such episodes on the grounds that the images were newsworthy. Even when news value is debatable, judges tend to side with the press.

However, the woman whose so-called whale tail was posted by Google for all to see was not part of any newsworthy event. The episode is almost identical to one of the best-known cases punishing a newspaper for a photo that invaded privacy. In 1961, an Alabama woman, Flora Graham, was visiting a county fair's funhouse with her young sons when air jets blew her dress up, exposing her panties. Unfortunately for Ms. Graham, a photographer snapped a shot at that very moment and the image showed up on the local newspaper's front page.

A jury gave Ms. Graham $4,166 for her anguish, and the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the verdict. "One who is part of a public scene may lawfully be photographed as an incidental part of that scene in his ordinary status," the court wrote. "Where the status he expects to occupy is changed without his volition to a status embarrassing to an ordinary person of reasonable sensitivity, then he should not be deemed to have forfeited his right to be protected from an indecent and vulgar intrusion of his right of privacy merely because misfortune overtakes him in a public place."

Of course, four decades later, social mores and technology have changed. "Anything done almost anywhere can be captured as an image on someone's cell phone and uploaded to the Internet," the dean of the University of Richmond law school, Rodney Smolla, said. "That genie can't be put back in the bottle. I think the law would be reluctant to fight against it."

Still, just last year, a lawyer for Lindsay Lohan, cited the funhouse case while threatening a gossip Web site with legal action over a photo in which one of the actress's nipples was exposed. "Just because a wardrobe malfunction occurred and Ms. Lohan's right breast was inadvertently and very briefly revealed and someone was able to photograph her in this intrusive manner without her consent or knowledge does not justify or legitimize publication or display of the photo or justify this violation of Ms. Lohan's right of privacy at a most basic level," the attorney, Martin Singer, wrote.

Google does offer a link to request removal of inappropriate Street View photos. The thong shot is no longer on the Web giant's site, though it is now readily available elsewhere, which makes its deletion from Google of little moment. "The privacy harm may very well have occurred by the time you are aware of it and ask that it be taken down," Mr. Bankston said. "We would have preferred that Google develop some technology to obscure the pedestrians in Street View before debuting it."