"A man is suing Google after a precarious picture of him showed up on the company’s Street View service," TG Daily reports.
The article continues, "Google now blurs faces of people that happen to be in the line of fire, but for one man in a small village in France, that’s not good enough. The roaming vehicle happened to spin by his house at the very moment he was relieving himself in his garden."
Adds the story, "Even though he was blurred, it was right outside his house and the town he lives in is small, so he became ‘an object of ridicule,’ according to his lawyer, Jean-Noel Bouillaud, as quoted by AFP. Google is able to justify literally driving through entire countries and taking pictures of every passing person because streets are public property where there is no expectation of privacy."
The article continues, "But the man in this case, whose name has not been revealed, said he was in his own privately owned property, with the gate closed. There, he does have a reasonable expectation of privacy."
Google’s expectations are based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision… that only affects U.S. citizens. Google doesn’t appear to get that such things have no weight outside the U.S.
However… the Frenchman’s notion that “he does have a reasonable expectation of privacy” on his private owned property lead me to conclude there are other reasons than the photograph of him that make him an object of ridicule. Would he expect a neighbor walking by to turn away if said neighbor caught him the act?
One can have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy inside one’s house, but one can’t reasonably expect such when outside of their house even if one is on their own property. Unless one lives behind a walled garden.