By Google’s Street View service has lead to quite a lot of controversy and many lawsuits emerged from the equation.
Some of the major legal problems a service such as Google Street View faces are related to privacy breaches.
The thing is, when you’re as big a giant as Google is, you can almost get away with murder in the view of your fans. This is what happened when some Germans refused to have their house photographed by Google Street View.
Their choice was respected and their houses have been blurred out by Google in a pretty normal fashion but fans don’t really agree. To this extent a number of Google fans egged the houses that were blurred out.
With the latest development against Google it will be hard to decide what happens. You see, back in 2008 a couple from Pennsylvania sued Google for trespassing when taking pictures for Street View.
Apparently, the Google Street View car that took pictures of the couple’s house went up a small road that’s private property. With such solid evidence at your hand the result was inevitable.
Google Street View car
The court finally awarded the lawsuit over to the Pennsylvania couple and Google has been labeled a trespasser. There was also a fine involved, but it’s not the sort you’re thinking about.
Google has been lawfully forced to pay the winning couple the amazing sum of $1.
I think this is great, the people involved just wanted to prove a point and weren’t after some get rich scheme. To be honest, the Pennsylvania couple did want to win a few other claims against Google but that wasn’t to be.
According to the Google Street View lawsuit winner this $1 is “one sweet dollar of vindication”.
Google aren’t in their best behavior and claim that now all of the couple’s friends will get lost as they don’t have Google Street View images to guide them.
That’s just plain silly, people did ok before Google Maps and Google Street View were invented so this shouldn’t be that big a problem.
