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Internet accessibility of images amassed by governmental organizations, commercial entities and individuals is the basis of novel privacy violation claims. However, Internet distribution of images of both individuals and private places collected from public places remains lawful.

Uproar over such imagery has sprung up in a variety of situations. For example, residents in California’s Humboldt and Sonoma counties claim that their privacy was violated by a governmental action that provides Internet accessibility to digital maps composed of photographs taken within each county and others believed Google’s Internet publication of more than 10 million roadside images constituted a multitude of privacy violations. Moreover, individuals have been subject to privacy violation actions after posting images on the Internet with services like Flikr (a popular photo-sharing Web site), YouTube (a popular video-haring Web site) and even user-generated news Web sites.

Despite the fact that images of people in compromising positions have been made accessible by Internet applications, the courts have found that Internet applications such as Street View are lawful. Most recently, the United States District Court for Western Pennsylvania dismissed a lawsuit (Boring v. Google 2:08-CV-00694-ARH (2009)) which claimed that a Google application called Street View which gives Internet users a driver’s perspective of hundreds of cities around the world was a reckless invasion of privacy.

Internet technology may have changed who may grant access to content but it has not changed the balance struck between privacy and free speech. Those who find applications such as Street View a privacy violation argue that the captured images of private areas were published without the consent of communities or of the photographed individuals. They complained that the Internet distribution of such private information is profoundly more intrusive than traditional technology because it allows for easier, wider, faster and more permanent content distribution than ordinary cameras and surveillance cameras.

In Boring v. Google, the court found that the tort of public disclosure of private facts is not violated by Google’s Internet broadcasting of private content because such e-broadcasting possesses some social value. Similarly, such e-broadcasting is not an intrusion upon seclusion because it was accessible from a public place.

Privacy rights are generally considered to have arisen as a result of Louis Brandeis’s article “The Right to Privacy,” (4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890)), which was inspired by the propagation of low-cost and easy-use cameras in the United States. The Kodak mobile photo technology enabled people to take clandestine photos and thus weaken an individual’s right privacy. Since then, “the right to be let alone” has been established in the United States.

The torts of public disclosure of private facts and intrusion upon seclusion were developed prior to the time when an individual at little cost could publish images of another to millions of people using the Internet. Arguably, just as the introduction of low-cost and easy-to-use image capture technology required new privacy rights, so too does low-cost and easy-to-use Internet image distribution technology. Without such new rights an individual may lose his right to control how he is seen by others.