Is Google Really Reasonable? Are Any of Us?
Is there privacy in public spaces? This is legal question has been around the block a time or two but has recently resurfaced in a media article in the NYTimes article titled “New Questions Over Google’s Street View in Germany.” The article brings up an ongoing dispute between German officials and Google over what information can and cannot be collected and displayed from Google Street View. If it sounds familiar to our “Oh Canada” neighbor that’s correct, German privacy laws are much stricter than the United States, which has no privacy issues with Street View. In response to official and judicial outcry, Google’s German site agreed to blur out identifying information like faces, license plates, house numbers and even entire properties based on owners’ request. Why not just put fig leaves over all of this offensive data sitting around?
While it might be easy to smile in the United States about the demure Germans (certainly the French took no issue), this debate brings up important considerations regarding the reasonableness of American privacy laws. In the Nissenbaum article, the author points to the challenge of delineating a “reasonable expectation of privacy in public” (12). Exactly what does “reasonable” mean anyway? If I’m walking down the street and taking pictures of my dog and happen to capture a view inside my neighbor’s window is this reasonable? According to the California Civil Code Section 1708.8 this would all depend on whether the neighbor might find said picture “offensive to a reasonable person.” So apparently whether I’m reasonable and whether my neighbor is reasonable legally matters!
The U.S. court cases that provide a precedence for this legal gray area offer little help in qualifying “reasonable.” In Nessenbaum we are given the example of Florida v. Riley in which the police discovered marijuana growing the defendants yard. The court ruled that the police department did not violate an expectation “that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable'” by flying over someone’s yard at 400 feet in a helicopter (14). Sure I take out my helicopter out all the time, I just don’t do it while walking the dog, and that my friends seems reasonable.
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