Boring couple forces Google into admitting that complete privacy no longer exists

By Davey Winder
Friday, 01 August 2008 19:37

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Has Google become schizophrenic? It seems that way as with one breath it tells us that it takes our privacy very seriously indeed, and in the next admits that there is no privacy...

Way back in April news broke that the unlikely sounding Mr and Mrs Boring were to take legal action against Google on grounds of a privacy violation. The crime in question being the photographing by Google of the Boring house, and its subsequent inclusion as part of the Google Maps Street View service.

The Boring argument was that the house was devalued as a result, and that the action of Google violated the desire for privacy that the couple had hoped to achieve when purchasing the property.

There seems little doubt, given the nature of the photographs and the layout of the property, that Google snappers would have had to walk onto a driveway that was clearly marked as being private in order to produce the photographs.

Anyway, that was then and this is now. And now is when the Boring case gets a little more interesting. In a preliminary statement to Google's US District Court motion to dismiss the Boring federal complaint, the search giant makes a somewhat dramatic observation.

The Smoking Gun which reprints a 9 page excerpt from the Google motion, says that the Google six lawyer team asserts "Today's satellite-image technology means that even in today's desert, complete privacy does not exist. In any event, Plaintiffs live far from the desert and are far from hermits."

The Inquirer, meanwhile, notes that "Google is being somewhat hypocritical here, as the company says that it takes privacy very seriously indeed, when in almost the same breath, it feels it can argue that privacy doesn’t actually exist."

Given the whole handling of the YouTube/Viacom affair just a few short weeks ago, I really cannot say I am surprised...