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Google StreetView Is In Your Driveway
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Apr 08, 2008 12:12 PM
from the friendly-google-car dept.
from the friendly-google-car dept.
hermit_crab writes "Janet and George McKee are the neighbors of the Borings, who we discussed yesterday as the couple suing Google over StreetView. The McKees own a house that is featured in a much more intrusive set of Google StreetView images. 'The Google car continued past the steps leading to the McKees's front door and came to a stop outside the house's three-car garage (and next to the family's trampoline and portable basketball rim). Taking photos all the time, the Google vehicle was squarely on private property, a fact that presumably should have been apparent when the gravel path became paved.' Unlike the Borings, the McKees have not announced intentions to sue Google, nor have they requested to have the images removed."
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Your Rights Online: Google Sued Over Privacy Invasion On Street View 481 comments
mikkl666 writes "A couple from Pittsburgh has sued Google because a photo of their house appeared on Google Street View. They are demanding in excess of $25,000 to make up for the 'mental suffering' and the diminished value of their home. Their street is apparently marked with a 'Private Road' sign, and they claim that putting a photo of their property online is an 'intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion' of their privacy. Google, on the other hand, claims that this lawsuit is pointless since anyone can ask them to have pictures removed without legal action. We've previously discussed some of the privacy concerns surrounding Street View."
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Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should that be apparent? There are gravel public lanes (and even a road or two) in my city, and it never would have occurred to me that such a thing would automatically mean private property.
Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Informative)
They were clearly and undeniably in the couples' driveway [thesmokinggun.com].
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty obvious that they were on someone's private driveway, and that they tried to turn around on someone's private property. Whoops, mistakes happen, but that's why you verify the results afterwards.
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, I didn't see anywhere in the PA statutes that say it's ok to trespass if you're just turning your car around...
Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Insightful)
They were clearly and undeniably in the couples' driveway [thesmokinggun.com].
I think there's a lot of deniability there.
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, perhaps the driver was simply pulling up to see if there was part of the driveway to turn around in, without having to pitch a k-turn on a single lane gravel road in a big google van...
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Informative)
That they chose to put a trampoline and their house right up against it is irrelevant.
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Informative)
Around 1996 or so, maps of our county were updated using areal photography, among other means. Our driveway, which is clearly posted, gated, about 600 feet long, and looks like a public road from the air, showed up on the next edition of the county map. We contacted the correct parties, who apologized, explained that it was an error, and took our driveway off of subsequent versions of the map.
Another state in which we own property requires that shared driveways be named for 911 purposes. We own the road, our neighbors have an easement, and the road name is on file with the county, but that doesn't give anybody the right to drive down it without permission (by the way, it's clearly posted). We don't get any government funding to maintain it, although we do get a sign with the road name where it meets the county road. Such street signs are yellow (not green), and have the letters "PVT" in addition to the road name. It's understood that such roads are legally no different than driveways, in that if the road is posted, you can be charged with criminal trespass for driving on it.
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you bother to look at the pictures? It's clear that this an invasion of privacy. Here's a clue. Read the articles again and look at the pictures again, but replace "Google" with "Microsoft", then see if you have the same opinion on the matter.
Damn, some people will defend Google no matter what they do. Just because someone claims that they're not evil, doesn't make it so. In fact, those that feel the need to constantly say "We're not evil" are *more* likely to be so. (It's like whenever you meet someone that says over and over, "I'm not a racist", nine times out of ten, they are a racist.)
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. Translation:
Normal Person: For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's Google's doing is trespassing.
./ know-it-all: But Google's got what nerds crave. It's got street view.
./ user #2: So wait a minute. What you're saying is, you don't think that Google should trespass?
./ user #2: Not even on a 'private road'?
./ know-it-all: But Google's got what nerds crave.
./ user #2: Yeah, it's got street view.
./ user #2: Well, people take pictures of my house, and I don't mind.
./ know-it-all: Hey, that's good! Are you a lawyer or something?!
./ user #2: But Google's GOT what nerds crave.
./ user #3: Yeah. It's got street view.
./ know-it-all: It's what they do at Google.
./ user #2: Cuz Google's got street view.
Normal Person: Yes.
Normal Person: Well, I mean... A private road is a grey area maybe, but definitely not a driveway. But yeah, that's the idea.
Normal Person: Okay, look. The people that live in at least one of these houses are complaining. Google seems to be trespassing. Other people seem to think so, too. So I'm pretty sure that this Google stuff's not working, at least not the way they are currently doing it. Now I'm no technologist, but I do know that if you put yourself on private property, it's called trespassing.
Normal Person: Okay, look. You want to solve this problem, right? So why don't we just try to talk about it, okay, and not worry about what nerds crave?
Normal Person: What ARE the legal implications of driving a van around people's yards to make something called "street view"? Do any of you even know?
Normal Person: Yeah, but WHY do they do this at Google?!
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That and a lot of "private" drives are city/county roads that homeowners have taken some liberties with. I drive by three "allies" on a regular basis that homeowners have seeded with grass. A quick look at the city maps and it's clear they haven't actually vacated the ally. I've heard some instances of road departments designating private roads as county roads in order to do a friend a favor as well.
Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case, I guess no one is too blame. The driver can't erase photos, and the programmer is probably just dumping them to the central website without noticing he's taken pictures of private property.
Sometimes the simplest explanation works best.
You can sue the driver for no noticing your hints.
You can sue the map-maker for not clearly marking your road as private property.
You can even sue the map-making company for not checking all the (weeks of) footage, before sending it to Google.
You can even sue Google for not removing the footage, after you asked them to remove it.
But, NOT ASKING and then spamming for ATTENTION is a waste of everyone's time.
I'm not here to defend Google, but if someone is doing something you don't like, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Don't just whine about it to other people.
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:4, Insightful)
How many public roads lead directly *into* a person's garage? At some point, the road changes from public to private property. Would you think the safer assumption would be that the private property begins at the threshold of the garage or somewhere earlier? It's quite rare to buy a house without buying the lot around it. If you assume that the property line does begin somewhere before the garage, where would you naturally assume that to be? Well, luckily you have an obvious line between gravel and pavement to tell you.
I can understand these guys mistakenly driving down this family's driveway and then having nowhere to turn around until they got to the garage area. But then you've gotta delete the photos. You can't tell me these guys didn't know they were on private property at *some* point, and the obvious line is where the road changes from gravel to paved.
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:4, Insightful)
For the record, I know plenty of people whose homes have no driveway, with garages that open directly onto the street, or across a sidewalk onto the street, and front doors that open directly onto a sidewalk adjacent to the street with no private sidewalk approach.
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:5, Insightful)
A. The van drivers are paid $7/hour and Google is worth $25 Billion.
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Re:Gravel! Turn back! (Score:4, Informative)
An employee is only under the protection by the company if they do not voilate the company rules. Like if they go and break the law when the company says that they will obey the law in their handbook, which is why they say things like that in there. Google didn't tell them to go to a specific lat/lon, they were tasked to follow the public roads and cover as much ground as they could while doing so.
If this goes to court all google has to say is "we asked the drivers to do X Y and Z" and they did w instead. Without instructions do tresspass the drivers are left with their own decisions and subsequent consequences. If google is a regular company and had the drivers sign a form that states they read the employee handbook, and they put in the employee handbook some clause to the effect of "don't break the law." then they are legally in the clear. PR and emotional juries notwithstanding of course.
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Private means private. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Private means private. (Score:5, Insightful)
2: tresspassing is not automatic. In most states even when properly posted, you can still go onto private land and go up to the front door. Even salesman can ring bells at homes posted no soliciting in SC. The onyl poewr you have is to ask them to leave. It only becomes tresspassing if they refuse to or if they return later. Neither of these conditions happened.
3: the proerty itself was not marked, posted, fenced with a gate, not in any other way abvious that is was private. I can't see in any of the pictures the van took where their so called private road sign exists, let alone complies with their state's laws concerning use of proper singage (including regionally accepted or universal images to assist those who can't read).
4: all they had to do was ask for the images to be removed.
5: the engineer in the vehicle has no control over the images being taken, not can he catalog or document them. This is ON PURPOSE to prevent tampering with the image feeds, and to keep the image recorder in sync with GPS information.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Please, cite PA state law which provides for this.
2: tresspassing is not automatic. In most states even when properly posted, you can still go onto private land and go up to the front door. Even salesman can ring bells at homes posted no soliciting in SC. The onyl poewr you have is to ask them to leave. It only becomes tresspassing if they refuse to or if they return later. Neither of these conditions happened.
http://me [aol.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind
Do this, don't do that... can't you read the signs?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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They have no right to be on private property.
I used to hunt a lot when I was a kid. In the woods, if private property is not posted or marked in any way, while you can't hunt, you can still walk across the land and the owner has to notify you personally or by certified mail to stay off his land before you are considered to be trespassing. The land in question here was not marked as private in any way, as I understand things. Now, these laws change a lot by location, and I imagine that the laws of city of Pittsburgh are a lot different than those of
Looks like you need a robots.txt... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Looks like you need a robots.txt... (Score:4, Funny)
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Intrusive??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Did people forget how to buy curtains?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Intrusive??? (Score:5, Insightful)
You likely would have done the same.
The driver has no control of the cameras in the vehicle. He could not turn them off to do this maneuver.
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Re:Intrusive??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. Roads go from paved to unpaved to paved all of the time. If they were really that concerned, they would have had a "Public Road Ends" sign put up. The driver was following a public map of a public road and went a few yards too far - $5 will get you $20 it happens to these folks all of the time, with people making wrong turns.
These people haven't even asked Google to take it down - why are everyone ELSE's panties in a twist?
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Not actually true [Re:Intrusive???] (Score:3, Informative)
While it's true that you can control whether people can take photographs while on your property, or enter your property for any r
Re: (Score:3)
Glancing in as you walk by is one thing, peeping is another.
Privacy isn't black and white, it's several degrees of control and expectations.
Re:Intrusive??? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is certainly not the case that somebody's driveway is sacrosanct territory, especially if it is the only approach to the house. What do you do if you're a vacuum salesman? You walk up the driveway and ring the bell. And, by the way, this means you can see into their windows. It doesn't mean you can stand in the bushes and peer into their windows; in that case you are considered to have intruded into the home's "curtilage", which is a vaguely defined region around parts of the house which is treated as almost equivalent to the interior.
But the driveway is not curtilage, nor is the front walk. You certainly are entitled to the stray photons that enter your eye as you traverse the areas of the property that are not off limits.
The legal doctrines covering privacy are, in the US at least, utter rubbish. What's more, patching the obvious problems with those doctrines only make them more confusing and imponderable. There's too much emphasis on disclosure as the significant even in any privacy situation. What you are entitled to see or hear, you are entitled to share, unless you have some kind of special legal duty to the parties you see or overhear. You are also, with certain restrictions and stipulations, entitled to record things your are entitled to perceive, and then to publish them.
And that' what we've got here. Obviously, this is the kind of thing that shouldn't be allowed, although I don't think there should be huge damages paid out. But I wouldn't be surprised if Google doesn't win if this comes to court. The state of privacy law is such that it common sense has very predictive value for how a borderline situation like this is adjudicated. Of course common sense notions of privacy are utter rubbish too.
The problem is that we're too concerned with the mechanics of disclosure and secret keeping. We're not concerned enough with personal autonomy.
Suppose you are a collector of erotic art. Very tacky erotic art. You don't much care if the vacuum salesman heading up the walk catches a glimpse of the very prominent sculpture you have in your living room. Nor are you much concerned that he probably tells other salesmen about the crazy people who had a gold plated lingam eight feet high in their living room.
But you might care if a potential employer could find that out by doing a Google search on your address. It's an issue of autonomy; you don't want people in a position to exercise power over you making decisions based on information that is irrelevant or which they don't understand.
That's really the essential personal interest you have in your privacy, but it's not weighed at all in privacy law, except possibly as part of evaluating damages.
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Not just Google (Score:3, Funny)
Opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
Your 15 minutes of fame are here. If you would like to capitalize on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I would suggest you contact our agency immediately. We have companies lined up, looking for advertising space, and if you act RIGHT NOW, we can offer you a lucrative advertising contract. We have excellent rates available for both rooftop and curtain based advertising.
Sincerely,
Marketing Scumbag
tit for tat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because one person does not care if google is all up on their grill, this does not mean that other people shouldn't care.
Lawyers. One industry that hurts our country. (Score:3, Insightful)
Still there (Score:3, Insightful)
It's clear the driver needed to make a u-turn in the driveway. There should be an on-off button for the picture taking precisely for this. There should have been no pictures taken from the dirveway.
Compare the difference between the street view [google.com] and the picture from the road at the county assessors [allegheny.pa.us].
Frankly I am more concerned about all the info available in other ways. When I was looking into buying a distressed home from someone trying to flip it, I found the social security numbers in mortgage papers online with the county. They just scanned them and put them online. When we bought a different house, I made sure that lots of stuff was blacked-out before it was duplicated.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
ot: slashdot is getting so ridiculously ajaxy! the preview "loading" pane is pink!
Re:"private road" signs? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0407081google2.html [thesmokinggun.com]
I se no evidence of "private road" signs, nor do I see "no trespassing" signs. The house is certainly not visible from the main street, and it's not really visible where the "gravel" portion of the driveway becomes "concrete", which was supposed to be some big tipoff.
I fail to be impressed
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Re:"private road" signs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Resident: You drove on my property!
Google: This county road?
Resident: That's my driveway!!!!
Google: Hold on while I get the county commisioner in on this.
Resident: NEVERMIND, HAVE A NICE DAY!!!!
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You really don't understand this issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't understand why "if you have nothing to hide, then what is the problem?" is a problem, then you really don't understand this issue.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When the vans turn around in ordinary driveways, or enter private communities who's roads are not included in GPS data, the cameras don't take pictures... If he parks in front of a starbucks