A Canadian woman has won a very small payout from Google because her cleavage was visible on the Street View function of Google Maps. The judge said her dignity had been violated.
Reporting of this story has been atrocious even by the media's misogynistic standards:
- It's predictably been reported as humorous or titillating because BOOBS.
- The plaintiff, who worked for a bank, quit her job in part because of the "malicious comments and humiliation she suffered at work". I haven't seen any reporting on what action, if any, was taken by or against the bank; nor on why, in the 21st century, any woman should be shamed for sitting outdoors in the sunshine in a vest top.
- The ubiquity of voyeurism and body-shaming, the inevitability of sexist and demeaning comments related to women and their bodies, all show that an important part of women's "privacy" is not protected under the current understanding of the term. No news outlet has taken up the issue of a woman's right to control the publication and reproduction of images of her body.
- Quite the opposite, in fact. A local tabloid has reproduced the Street View image she went to court to contest. The image is now all over the internet.
- Below the line, there's the usual victim-blaming, slut-shaming, another-woman-milking-the-legal-system misogyny that this sort of reporting is designed to encourage.