Is Google Street View An Invasion of Privacy?

The issue of individual rights to privacy has come under fire as the Internet grows. Practically everybody who surfs the web has some sort of “online profile,” enough so that it’s hardly considered vanity these days to type your name into a search engine to find out what information the Internet has compiled about you.

Earlier this week I was looking at Google Maps for an address in my hometown. When I found it, Google Maps asked if I wanted to see a street view. So I typed in my own address, and in a few moments I was looking at a photo of my house. With just a couple of mouse clicks, I could see all the houses on my block. That’s kinda cool, I thought. Using the photo and the real estate website Zillow.com, I had fleeting dreams of selling my house through the Net without a Realtor.

What I thought was a clever use of technology apparently doesn’t make everybody happy. The Smoking Gun website reports that a Pittsburgh couple has filed a suit accusing Google of “intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion” of their secluded home. In the filing, they note that they chose the house because of a desire for privacy, and that when Google put their address information and photo online, that privacy was gone. They are asking more than $25,000 in damages and demanding that Google destroy the photos.

But, thanks to the lawsuit, the photos are now available – and not just on Google Maps. Even if Google destroys the originals, the couple’s address is listed in the filing, and now the photos are out of the camera, so to speak, and already in the public domain. I’m looking at them on the SG site right now.

This could be an important case in determining case law Internet privacy issues. But the point made might already be moot.