Sounds Like Another Liability for Realtors

Google is being sued.  Nothing to shocking there….. Big companies get sued every day, right?  Well in this case it’s because they took a photo.  That’s right, they took a photo, and now they’re being sued.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t care one bit about another corporate lawsuit, but this one is because a photo of a house ended up online, and the homeowners didn’t take kindly to it.

They say it’s an invasion of privacy, and they want $25,000 for the mental anguish.  Seriously, this is just nuts!  They claim Google was trespassing, and yet the county government has a website with photos of the home posted, and there’s no complaint there….  In fact, I can pull down the FLOOR PLAN of their house from public websites. so I’m not sure what “privacy” they lost here.  I can pull more information on their home from the county government online than I could from Google…. so why aren’t they suing the county?

I sincerely hope that this lawsuit is thrown out.  If Google was trespassing, fine, penalize them!  But suing because you don’t like the fact they put a photo of your home online sounds like a frivolous lawsuit to me.  The fact is that if people were to be sued for exterior photos that have someone’s private residence in them, what’s to stop people from suing because those photos from family vacations happen to have a house in the background and the photos end up on flickr or photo bucket?