Weeing Frenchman sues Google over Street View photo A Frenchman is suing Google over a Street View photo that shows him peeing in his garden, which has made him the laughing stock of his village. As with most people in Street View pics, the man is slightly blurred, but because he comes from such a small place and he was at his own house, everyone recognised him. "He discovered …
Nor me, and by bringing the case to court has meant any person viewing the register and daily mail will see the pic.
I can kinda see something to the right of the number plate, but I guess if your not going to pi$$ in your toilet, you never know who is looking. But even if there is a hose pipe ban, don't pi$$ on your car!
Perhaps having a warning vehicle in front of the google camera car/van might an idea, after all i guess the aim of the game is to photograph streets etc, not the people.
"This gentleman is an awkward customer who hopes to make a quick buck."
...or possibly doesn't appreciate being photographed in his own damned garden and put on the internet. If his gate was closed and he couldn't be seen by pedestrians, then he would have a reasonable expectation of privacy, IMO.
That dam Google with their magic wall penetrating street view system,
How about this simple rule to live by - if you don't want anyone to see what you are doing then don't do it where anyone can see.
Else learn to laugh it off.
(can someone explain why it feels like the percentage of people who are just stupid is rising so fast?)
My two theories
One - there is the same amount of "smarts" to be distributed to every generation. So as the number of people increase there are more people are at the end of the line when we run out. Ask anyone from an older generation and they will be very happy to tell you how stupid the youth of today are. {}:>))
or in the past stupid people would die off at an early age (well, they are stupid) and have less of an impact on the rest of us. Now we do so much to protect them and keep them alive - not sure why.
A quick search (and Google is your friend here!) shows the camera to be, perhaps, 10 feet above ground level.
See: http://perpetualanticipation.blogspot.com/2011/06/strange-and-beautiful-photos-from.html
Compare the gentleman in the background to the camera height, assume he is 6 feet tall.
My god your right - we need to pass some laws
Everyone over 6 feet needs to crawl everywhere
All buses, trucks and tall SUVs need black out windows
Stilts - just shoot anyone walking on stilts
Ban any neighbors from having houses that may see into the yard - or they can't have windows.
Or maybe just say if you whip it when outside just smile for the camera.
His case revolves around the fact he was photographed while urinating, correct?
So as a judge (real life judge in Crown Court), I would be required to be shown conclusive proof that he was urinating, rather then merely washing his car - as can be surmised by the hosepipe.
On the subject of invasion of privacy, there really is no case to answer anyway. Google did not photograph people in the street, they photographed the streets - people just happened to be in them at the time. Its no different to photographing a statue in the park, your children swimming, your car, or anything else in a public place where people are also incidentally photographed. Unless you intend SPECIFICALLY to photograph somebody, you are entitled to take photographs in the street. What you see on Street View is exactly what you see from eye level (approx 6 ft as you say). Therefore there is no invasion of privacy also.
I would probably throw the case out (with a recommendation that Google simply blur him out entirely and be done with it) on the basis that he will be unable to prove he wasn't doing anything that 1000's of other people in the world were doing and have no problem with it.
The problem is not that they or anyone else happening to pass by ***in that small village in France*** could see him (he certainly wouldn't have sued a passing neighbour), but that Google takes a picture and then goes and ***distributes*** it world-widely for millions of people to see (most of which would never ever come to that small village in France).
You make it sound like Google maliciously and deliberately posted the photo just to embarrass him. But the fact of the matter is that this guy is not the first to get caught... err.. out, nor will he be the last. Furthermore, all you have to do is fill out a form and google will revisit the picture and do some further touching up.
Meanwhile, he's created enough of a stir that he's now the WORLD's laughing stock, never mind just his little village.
" You make it sound like Google maliciously and deliberately posted the photo just to embarrass him.But the fact of the matter is that this guy is not the first to get caught... err.. out, nor will he be the last. "
No, it's that Google negligently published the picture without any editorial control, despite various similar incidents in the past. Google's business model is "give offerings to the Almighty Algorithm", and is predicated on minimal human intervention. Even if he gets the money he's asked for, Google will continue to do this, and people will continue to be compromised in Google snaps. Because it's making lots of money for Google.
This is stupid - I don't care where you live if you don't want someone (your neighbor, someone driving by, or the Google street view camera) seeing what you are doing then don't do it where they can see!
In today's where where just about everyone is carrying a camera (cell phone) the odds are someone is going to capture it and it is going to end up on the internet.
If you do whip it out for the world to see then make sure you are a "big enough" man to handle it.
"That dam Google with their magic wall penetrating street view system,..."
The Google Streetview cameras take their photos from a vantage point considerably higher than someone walking in the street - some of the complaints, where Streetview has photographed people in their garden behind a 2m wall, don't seem unreasonable. However, the peeing Frenchman appears to be a bit if a chancer.
The Google cars were a standard car with a little tripod/tower affair on the roof and cameras on top. Tall as you are; the Google cameras were taller than you. Unless -of course- you are a 7' basketball player on a pogo stick.
The Google cameras were a lot higher than the average eyeball; and there's no way to plan for that. Well OK there is; but until the G-cams came around, there was no point in guarding against that scenario because there were no tall pogo stick enthusiasts in your village.
I know for sure that if I had an 'unguarded moment' on my own land when I thought I was in private; and it later turned out that someone with a high-ish camera took a photo and put me on the internet without my permission; I would be unbelievably pissed off. I would require a minimum of:
The driver to be slapped with a fish of not less than 5 Lb; wielded by a rugby player and with a runup of between 5-6 metres. The fish should not be frozen, because that would be nasty. Nor should it be one of those South American ones with lots of teeth and pointy bits. And nothing from Australia because all the nature is trying to kill you there.
Whoever thought of it should prostrate themselves in front of every single person in the village on a little rubber mat; apologise massively for the intrusion; And pay the man his 10K. For a data rape of that magnitude; 10K is eminently reasonable. It doesn't even matter what he was doing...look at the angle of the photo (we're looking down on guttering). It was a privacy rape and the rapists should make amends.
"How can you compare that with rape?", I hear you cry. And you have a point. As far as I know, rape doesn't go on for more than hours and they don't know what you're thinking. Google goes on for life and they do.
1 thumbs up & 2 thumbs down
What? WHAT? Because I used the word rape? The rot started when governments voted themselves the right to read my fucking email. That was quite a while ago; and it seemed to happen everywhere and nobody seemed to notice it.
It's taking your most personal things -your thoughts- and using them for purposes that are not your own.
WTF?
Please pay attention.
You have a regular sized car with a pod on the roof.
When the car is taking LIDAR measurements, they are also taking photographs. The instruments when extended are raised above the car. So at 6' your line of sight standing next to the car is at the roof line. The cameras when extended are going to be higher. Let's say 3' higher. Again I don't know because the cars are different in each country and the setups will vary. (I don't think all cars have LIDAR mounted on them. )
The car's cameras are high enough to peep over privacy walls.
Not to mention as another poster pointed out that Google posts the photos automatically w little human intervention.
Could they preprocess the photos to see if there are humans in the shot and then do a manual inspection? Yes, but that would take a large cluster of computers and cost $$$$.
(and yes I know the rough numbers ... ;-)
So Google could do more to respect the pivacy.
Note also that there have been lawsuits in other countries limiting the activities of Googles cars.
And if you look at the picture you can tell that the camera was a *lot* higher than any pedestrian you are ever likely to see.
Not many people have their eyes at roof-height!
If you weren't there with a step-ladder peering over the wall you would never have seen it - IMHO this is what makes it a privacy violation. If you were in a high vehicle you would have had a fleeting glimpse and that's it - as opposed to taking a picture and publishing it on the net just to sell more adverts.
But it's OK because it's google and they are doing it to *everyone* so you aren't allowed to object and the don't-care crowd shouts louder anyway.
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French guys usually seem happy to carry on chatting mid-pee from those bizarre hides-a-bit-of-you metal shed pissoir things with no sense of shame at all.
I'm guessing that to actually suffer embarrassment the picture must have been very close up indeed.
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One essential difference though, is that pissoirs are actually designed for pissing in, unlike a garden.
We've all taken a leak somewhere in public, behind a tree or in a shop doorway, if we're nowhere near an available toilet, but you have to be one lazy-ass mo-fo if you *can't be bothered to walk into your own house* to take a slash.
I imagine his neighbours' mockery is based more on his laziness, than on his violation of the acceptable rules of French behaviour (which I understand to be somewhat more 'relaxed' than those of the average Daily Mail reader).
Mine's the one with the funnel and plastic tubing in the pocket.
Yeah, the Vespasiennes
http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/vespasienne
most have been closed, like 99.99%, for years.
They are now closed structures for 1... Officially...
and free to use in Paris...
The Vespasiennes were also known as Pissotieres
http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/pissotière
Try and translate the french examples given for pissotière, explaning the use in a sentence (nsfw... possibly worse with google translate...) and you will understand, possibly, why they were closed...
Hold on a minute there. Where I used to live there was only one bathroom and the hot water tank was in a cupboard in my room. I would often get woken up to the sound of running water when someone got up for a shower. This means I awoke with an urgent need to piss (exacerbated by a night on the sauce usually) and an inhabited bathroom. My only option in these circumstances was to leg it behind the shed.
Admittedly, I did use the back garden.
In the USA, whizzing in view of the street can be prosecuted as public lewdness. It has unfortunate side effects of also-affecting nursing mothers, etc.
If it is legal and meets local health codes to whiz on your driveway, then this guy did nothing wrong. He just didn't want it on Google.
It doesn't change the fact that he is NASTY, through.
Public nursing still has its taboos. Women DO get arrested for it, usually as part of an indecent exposure misdemeanor 'ticket'. The last I heard, public parks and other seemingly public places have rules that cover breastfeeding.
There are privately-funded legal representation groups that attempt to get these statutes off the books, though. Maybe someday...
"If his gate was closed and he couldn't be seen by pedestrians, then he would have a reasonable expectation of privacy, IMO."
This isn't the test under French law merely because it is in US law; you might as well discuss Shariah. The right to one's own image applies in French law, as does the right to have one's dignity preserved. This is an interesting case in that the identity is understandable even though the image of the person is obscured, and means that it could be either an image that denies dignity or an effective news story breaching the right to a private life. French privacy law is really very strong, so discussions of US law have almost no bearing.
Do you all talk American school slang euphemism now? How about "pissing" (happens to be that or similar in most European languages) or "peeing" or "urinating" or even, let's be a little old fashioned, "passing water"?
Suppose you precious idiots ask for a "bathroom" even when you want just a lavatory/WC/toilet in case someone is too delicate ever to need a WC themselves. Or do you rush off for a rest in the Restroom?
Anyway, perhaps the man has got a prostate problem and could not wait. It's his garden, of his home and I imagine he was not expecting a camera to be peering over his fence or hedge. After all, if some passing tourist or neighbour had photographed him in such a way and got it published in a newspaper or stuck the picture on the parish noticeboard, even you may have found it objectionable. So why should some large advertising company be allowed to do what it likes?
. Why should anyone have his or her image in any pose scattered around the world, without permission, by some advertising company for the prurient delight of some passing Reg reader? Privacy? What is that exactly?
League Against USA colonisation of Language and Culture and loss of personal freedom
I agree :)
If anyone takes my picture and expects to use it for anything, then I would most certainly expect them to clear the use of said picture with me. Or _sufficiently_ anonymize the picture.
Neither of these things happen in this case. The man is surely owed at least his $10k - were it up to me, the penalty would be higher for corporations above a certain budget. Cumulative, you know ...
So, can we say, pissing in your garden if you have a perfectly good bog indoors is a bit, say, tacky?
Someone passing by sees you and takes the piss.
Someone with a camera sees you, posts it on the interwebs, and lots of people take the piss.
This is something that could have easily been avoided (no pun intended), and down to your own lack of tack. The size of the audience is entirely coincidental. Privacy is dependent on your (and everyone else's) expectation of a private act in a private place. I doubt that that would extent to "in full view of anyone in the street". Having the right to ones image would be a hell of a thing to preserve. You would probably end up with a total prohibition on posessing a camera in a public place.
OK, lots of "piss" in this comment. No wonder I have a shiny 'S' key :)
Google street view cars have their camera mounted on a tripod/ pole contraption which places the camera at 2.7 metres above road level..or about 8 feet and nine inches above road level for the merkins and the metrically challenged Brits..
Here in France you need planing permission to build your garden wall ( on modern houses ) higher than 2.00 metres ( about 6 feet 6 inches ) ..this is to stop you building bloody great walls and blocking out the light from your neighbors garden or house windows..and you get flak from the local council if you let your hedge etc obscure their light too ..so most garden walls ( on modern homes at least ) stop at around the 2.00m or 6 feet 6 inch mark..
This guy was photographed by the street view car..over the top of an 8 foot, dense hedge ( the man, the house, the garden , the hegde, the lawyer etc, were all on French TV here this evening ) running along side the road that runs by his garden.. the street view camera is not at a height that any pedestrian could see things at..it is incredibly intrusive, and in France it is illegal to photograph someone who is not in a public place without their permission ..blurring them after the fact does not give Google or anyone else the ability to flout the law here..
He was in his own back garden behind his own bloody high dense hedge..he can do what he wants..
Google have also been in trouble for photographing over the tops of cafe style curtains ( the kind that only cover the lower 3/4 of windows, but that stop people less than 2m tall seeing in ) into peoples houses..and even for photographing into their bedrooms on old houses with low first floors..In Japan they had to lower the cameras to the eye level of an average person or as close as they could get to Japanese average ..had to be under 6 feet IIRC..
France takes privacy very seriously..a fact which some of you should be grateful for as the CNIL here seem to be the only ones with the balls to tackle Google and Facebook et al over online tracking, privacy etc..
"From the pictures on the dailymail I would say you can't see anything"
It stands to reason (pardon the pun) that the Daily Mail would possibly want to avoid being slapped with the same lawsuit. Presonally, I don't think the guy is an awkward customer at all (libel as well?): EUR 10k is an entirely reasonable sum in comparison to what it would cost Google in ye olde US of A.
However, I see a VERY expensive argument being used: "we are not in France, and thus do not have to comply with French laws". If the court accepts that as an argument it would provide Google with a very convenient excuse to do whatever they like. Google has already discovered that this doesn't fly with Streetview, there isn't a judge in France who will let that argument stand - almost regardless of the merits of the case itself.
As for the case itself, you have a formal right to privacy as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and implementations thereof. A fence above eye height (typically 1.8m and above) is clearly for privacy. Any t*sser standing next to your fence with a periscope is thus willfully infringing your privacy, and so are Google's cameras at the height they operate - and they know this (Switzerland and Japan were first to object). Forget "too big to comply" or "we're foreigners", if fence > 1.8m and data acquired, then breach. Simple.
If that was for me ? ..I'm Irish not French..but live in France..
Left te UK ( where I had lived for near 30 years ) in 1987 ( after Thatcher and Major had ruined the Uk it looked to be wanting to go down the same path for the next 20..Maybe John Smith could have made it somewhere worth staying..but then he "cough" died "cough"..so I was time to get out :-)..
traveled around a few years wound up here..
It has it's faults..
But at least it didn't have Blair...and it is waaay less chavvy than the UK...nor is it the de facto aircraft carrier for the US..and it doesn't bend over and hand the lube to Google, Facebook and other US mega corps..
It reminds me of Britain or Ireland in the late 60's..apart from the large cities ..and large cities are crap in every country ..I know..I've lived in many before arriving here..
...granted, this isn't quite how I thought it would manifest, but...
"He is suing Google in a court in Angers for infringement of privacy and use of his image without permission. He wants the photo taken off the site and, naturally, he wouldn't mind about €10,000 in damages as well."
Tell me now, is the picture of him his intellectual or creative property? What about the garden he's standing in or the way he has painted his house? If it is, then there is a collision here between privacy (non-privacy) laws and IPR, isn't there? If not (and I can hear lotsa people saying "No reasonable expectation of privacy means footage can be taken") then suddenly art galleries, cinema's and theatres have an issue too, don't they? Those are public locations and thus I am free to take pictures and films?
Even if there is some dubious clause to protect corporate privacy and not private privacy (and I'd hardly be suprised at the existence of such), then I still think its only a matter of time before some company slurps someone's original artistic works and runs afoul of the "artists" IPR.
If I write a message on gmail to someone, and google slurps it, then surely they are in breach of my intellectual property rights, or is it the case that I have no expectation of privacy in my emails and therefore the content can be legally copied by anyone who wants it?
Either way, I see exploits.
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