QUESTION: One morning, as I was getting ready to go out, I saw a young woman in a blue station wagon taking pictures of my house. There were maps spread out on the seat next to her. She drove up the driveway of our duplex-multiplex area, then turned around and went away before I could catch up with her. Is there any way of finding out what she was doing and why she was taking pictures without our permission?

ANSWER: Not unless you wanted to pursue charges.

In general, if someone doesn't have permission to be on your property and, when asked, doesn't leave, you can call police at 911 and make a trespassing report, said Honolulu Police Department spokeswoman Michelle Yu.

You indicated you were just curious about why someone would want to take photos of your house.

Since you have a shared driveway, it could be that another homeowner gave the woman, perhaps a real estate agent, permission to come on the property, Yu said. She suggested checking with your neighbors.

A stranger taking photos of your house brings up the issue of privacy rights.

Consider Google Maps Street View, in which photos of millions of homes and streets across the United States and the world can be readily accessed online.

But unless you can somehow prove harm or an invasion of privacy, it is not against the law for someone to take a photo of your house or property from a public sidewalk or street — or even from your driveway (trespassing being a separate issue), said Danielle Conway, professor of law at the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law.

Conway teaches Internet law and policy and is writing a paper bringing in “;all aspects of the digital world — about information gathering; privacy interests; government interference in our personal lives; how we are trading our privacy for technology and access to the Internet.”;

There's no privacy interest regarding a house per se, but with what is “;within the home, and usually, the law is meant to protect (someone) from government intrusion that is unreasonable or illegal,”; Conway said.

While there are rights to privacy based in tort law (involving civil wrongs), simply taking a photo of a house doesn't really fall into that realm of intrusion or harm, she said.

The case could be made for an invasion of privacy “;if someone takes a viewable photo of someone's address,”; e.g., coming up to a house and taking a photo not only of the address, but the residents' name out front.

That's when you start to see a possible “;colorable claim”; (valid or plausible claim), Conway said.

“;But if someone were taking a picture because they thought the architecture were pretty ... even if that person were in my driveway,”; it would be difficult to claim harm or intrusion.

In January a federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit by a Pennsylvania couple who sought a minimum $25,000 in damages from Google for allegedly trespassing and invading their privacy when an employee came up their driveway and took a photo of their house.

A lower court had tossed out the lawsuit. The appeals court also tossed out the couple's clam of an invasion of privacy, but allowed the alleged trespassing claim to stand. However, it said that unless they could prove actual harm, they would probably only get $1 in damages.

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