While the Google Street car has been known to capture some crazy situations, this is the first time that the vehicle has snapped several photographs of a naked woman within the United States. Captured standing outside her house holding a water jug, the Miami-based woman catches the Google automobile turning the corner and continues to put her hand up to her mouth in shock in subsequent pictures. The vehicle captured at least three images of the woman before continuing down the street. As of yesterday, the images were made available through Google Street View without any photo manipulation. Earlier this morning, Google quickly added a large blurry cloud (image below) over the photos of the woman to hide the nudity, but have kept the images of the area available online.
It’s unknown if the woman intentionally walked outside, but it appears from the images that she was caught off guard by the Google vehicle. The potential for litigation is currently uncertain, but the unedited images have quickly spread around the Web through social media and blogs. In November 2010, another photo involving nudity was taken in Germany where a naked man was captured inside an open trunk of a car appearing to clean the inside of the trunk. In addition, a dormant dog was laying nearby either sleeping or possible deceased. During August 2010, a nine-year-old girl in England pretended to be dead in a Google Street View photo and sparked a tabloid race to disparage Google for the photo.
However, Google did capture actual deceased bodies in Brazil earlier this year and got a dose of public scrutiny after local broadcaster Globo G1 showed images that displayed a corpse in Rio de Janeiro with blood splatter on the sidewalk and street. However, this story was quickly forgotten after a group of people in Germany staged a fake image of a group of people panicking while a pregnant woman lay on the sidewalk supposedly giving birth to a baby. German citizens have been particularly vocal against Google Street View with over 250,000 households opting out of the program leading Google to shut down the process in that country.
