Woman’s Knickers in a Twist over Google Street View
YNOT – A Japanese woman quite literally has gotten her knickers in a twist after having her unmentionables mentioned by Google Street View. One of the search engine’s roving vehicles captured an image of the woman’s underwear drying on a line outside her apartment in Japan and posted the picture to the internet.
According to Japan’s Mainichi newspaper, the woman is suing Google for 600,000 yen, about U.S. $7,000, for psychological distress.
“I was overwhelmed with anxiety that I might be the target of a sex crime,” the unnamed woman told a Japanese district court in the city of Fukuoka. “It caused me to lose my job, and I had to change my residence.”
The lawsuit further claims that having her clean underwear exposed caused an existing obsessive-compulsive disorder to worsen.
Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the woman that suing Google, and the publicity that has followed, means her knickers have gotten a far more public airing than if she’d simply finished drying them and then folded and put them away.