The tech giant has been fined 2,250 Canadian dollars because it posted an image on Street View, which showed a Canadian woman’s cleavage. A Canadian court judge has decided that despite being in public, sitting on the steps of her private property, the Canadian woman’s privacy had been disrespected.
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The woman’s lawyer claimed that besides malicious comments and humiliation she suffered at work, the woman has also experienced a significant loss of personal modesty and dignity.

As you know, Google’s Street View cars drive around the streets with cameras, capturing a 360-degree view for mapping services. Afterwards, the pictures are stitched together in order to create a service letting Google users to browse streets and buildings from the ground level.

However, Google Maps has seen resistance from various information protection regulators in many countries. For example, Germany has fined Google €145,000 for “unprecedented privacy violations”. It is also known that Italy also recently fined Google €1m over complaints that the Street View cars that were driving around 4 years ago were not clearly recognizable. Finally, in the United Kingdom, last year the company was demanded to delete information captured about Wi-Fi networks by its Street View cars.

The Canadian woman had initially sued for $45,000 in damages. Her charges included the “right to have a private life” – she pointed out that despite her face in the picture had been automatically blurred out, like all other images of people taken by Google’s Street View cars, she could be clearly identified thanks to her house and car registration plate.

The woman clamed she suffered mockeries, derisions, disrespectful and sexually related comments in relation to the pictures because people could identify her despite anonymization precautions taken by Google.

The photos in question were captured by the cars four years ago and were later released onto the Google Maps website in October 2009. The woman claimed she requested Google remove the picture, but got no response from the firm headquartered in Ontario for its Canadian operations.

She filed the case two years later with the Canadian small claims court. In response, the company claimed that it had blurred all the parts of her image, and her house was also blurred in 2011 removing her image from the mapping service.