Woman Sues Google Over Street View Shots of Her Underwear 417
Kittenman writes "The Telegraph (and several US locals) are covering a story about a Japanese woman who had her underwear on the line while the Google car went past. She is now suing Google: 'I was overwhelmed with anxiety that I might be the target of a sex crime,' the woman told a district court. 'It caused me to lose my job and I had to change my residence.'"
"Target of a sex crime", seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Expectation of Privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems hard to imagine that the woman expected her delicates to stay completely private when she hung them up for the entire world to see.
This is the part that really stands out. What makes you think she hung them up "for the entire world to see"? I mean, what we have today is kind of a whole new level in the public vs. private continuum. There's "private". Then there's "public". But then there's "on the Internet", which is a whole different ball of wax.
There is a shift that needs to happen in how we view things. Obviously, the moment you step out of a private residence, you can no longer expect privacy. But perhaps there is a reasonable expectation of something that falls somewhere between "private" and "on the Internet".
Re:Common sense says... (Score:4, Interesting)
In Japan, where streets are small and houses close, people are very used to not looking and not seeing things plainly visible from the street. It would be really rude to stare, and it isn't done.
If the fact that it’s airing up there visible for the world to see doesn’t mean that anybody should be staring at it, neither does the fact that it’s visible on Google Street View.
Re:Common sense says... (Score:4, Interesting)
we'll talk again next time you get playful with your significant other in a secluded, but public, spot. or in your living room without the drapes drawn.
Re:Expectation of Privacy (Score:2, Interesting)
this point of view seems to be in vogue on slashdot recently, as a backlash against privacy nuts, but no-one ever explains what they mean by public, so the argument falls flat. Is a conversation between two people at a cafe private? What about a husband and wife arguing in the cafe? Common decency would mean that most of us would take pains to ignore that argument, despite it being in public, because it would be considered an intrusion to appear to be listening. And yet the ridiculous /. definition of public is that anything that can be seen by anyone in the street is fair game to be plastered up online for all to see. "Private" is limited to what goes on strictly inside the four walls of your house. That also excludes windows of course, since if you choose to leave your curtains open, then clearly you don't mind people taking photos of you in your living room. And of course if you didn't want the world to see what was going on in your garden, then you should have planted a 30ft hedge.
Until the day that one day google streetview cars add infrared cameras. Then there'll be an outcry. /. will be up in arms, until a few months down the line when that argument starts getting used by mainstream press, and the general /. consensus will shift towards "well, it's fair enough, after all, you ARE giving off that infrared radiation."
Until we start to get some kind of a consensus on what the word public actually means, these arguments will never go anywhere, and they are very, very important arguments.
this post will probably be buried as I don't have an account, but I needed to vent
also, possibly dupe as /. doesn't like text browsers with no js
Re:Common sense says... (Score:4, Interesting)
You *do* close the blinds before having sex, don't you?
But the real issue is that people are too hung up over this in the U.S. If such an incident happened to most normal people in the rest of the world, they would simply take better precautions and move on with their life. Going into a panic over it to the point where you get paranoid and dysfunctional is the wrong way to handle the problem. Also, there would be less of an issue with stalkers and so on if the U.S. wasn't so anally obsessed with maintaining a pseudo-1950s ideal of purity about the human body. I mean, as it was pointed out a couple of days ago here, you can show someone's head being exploded in a PG movie but you show a little too much skin and you're looking at a R rating.
ie - most of the rest of the industrialized world doesn't generally have to worry as much about such issues because sex and the body in media is far more accessible. So there's less of a psychological issue amongst the society because they can easily and simply get their porn or whatever as they need to. You'll note that the most sexually repressed societies are also amongst the most violent, especially in terms of assaults and rape.
Of course, this is barely being touched upon in modern Psychology. The idea that high incidents of rape and physical assault are a result of societal issues and a dysfunctional environment between the sexes and people's views of themselves and their bodies.
Some interesting reading:
http://www.ipce.info/library_2/pdf/prescott_en.pdf [ipce.info] (perhaps the first study of its kind, though largely ignored in the U.S. until recently)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1981.tb01068.x/abstract [wiley.com] - This is extremely recent and a (long overdue) logical progression of the hypothesis, IMO.
The book "An Interview with The Devil" also has a coupe of great passages in it about this. Though it's mostly tongue-in-cheek humor, there is a valid point to be made about how people who are less able to show affection and obtain closeness with others end up being more violent. You'll note that the U.S. is even worse off than ever before and we also at the same time can't even hug each other or touch each other in public/school/work/etc without fear of being charged with a crime.
It would be interesting to do a study on sexual and physical repression in terms of the collapse of great empires throughout history. I suspect that the results might be quite interesting.