https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Clerks-Violate-Privacy-Prints-at-photo-labs-2952973.php
Clerks Violate Privacy / Prints at photo labs often passed around
Suzanne Herel, Chronicle Staff Writer
Published 4:00 am PST, Sunday, February 11, 2001
Kathleen Harmon had just dropped off a roll of sexually explicit shots for one-hour developing when she got a call from an ex-boyfriend, a bartender. The photo clerk and his buddies were at his bar, he said, pawing through a duplicate set of her prints.
The Phoenix resident rushed to the bar, confiscated her pictures and eventually sued the store, 60 Minute Photo, claiming her privacy had been invaded. The case was settled out of court.
Harmon is one of a number of shutterbugs across the country whose pictures have been surreptitiously snatched by rogue photo clerks who pass them around, and even collect them in scrapbooks.
"This is as common as the day is long," says Phoenix attorney Richard Groves, who has handled two purloined picture incidents, including Harmon's 1993 case. "Unless you stand there and watch them being developed, you certainly are taking a risk."
Photo clerks -- in many cases a transient lot of high school and college students earning pocket money -- view every picture that comes in for developing, from the shots of the Tiffany diamond ring taken for insurance purposes to the baby's naked bum to more risque flights of fancy.
In general, clerks are instructed to be on the lookout for child pornography, and occasionally they run into other questionable behavior. That was the case when Kelly Bennett, a San Jose photo clerk, prevented an alleged potential massacre at De Anza College in Cupertino a couple of weeks ago by alerting police to suspicious shots of firearms and pipe bombs.
Otherwise, photo developing labs say there are strict rules governing customer privacy, and that clerks who violate them are acting on their own.
But as those whose privacy has been violated have realized, not all photo clerks are trustworthy.
When Harmon retrieved her photos from the bar, she found among them nude shots of other, unfamiliar women who were never identified.
Given the serendipitous way his clients have discovered misdeeds against them, Groves said that's not surprising. There are probably many men and women who have been victimized by photo lab technicians, but never know it.
"The chances of this guy showing those pictures in a bar where the bartender had dated the woman were incredibly slim," Groves said.
In his other case, a photo clerk had printed an extra set of photos of a semi-nude woman but then had a change of heart, Groves said. So he tossed them in a Dumpster, where neighborhood kids found them.
The youngsters' parents caught them with the booty -- and recognized the subject as a neighbor. They notified the woman, who had been photographed topless as a Valentine's Day surprise for her husband.
The situation took another strange twist when the woman told Groves, her attorney, that at one time she had worked for the very supermarket where her photos had been developed. "She was aware of the fact that the store manager actually had a scrapbook in his office of a lot of nude people diverted over a long period of time from the photo department," Groves said. "This goes on all the time."
Minnesota attorney Keith Miller concurs.
"I am under the impression that a significant number of photo labs in the world have a little drawer of stuff that they have printed and kept," Miller said. "It's just human nature."
Miller took up the case of two Moorhead State University students who, while on vacation in Mexico, were photographed joking around nude in the shower. The local Wal-Mart refused to develop the picture for the women, who later discovered it had been printed anyway -- and passed around campus.
"We were at a fraternity party, and one of our friends said, 'We heard you guys were getting it on in the shower,' " said Elli Lake, now 25 and a volleyball coach and substitute teacher in Minneapolis.
The Minnesota Supreme Court issued a landmark 1998 ruling allowing Lake and her best friend, Melissa Weber, to sue Wal-Mart for privacy violation. A jury followed up the next year, deciding that the women's privacy had been invaded but declining to award damages against Wal-Mart, because the photo clerk was never named in the suit.
Nonetheless, the case changed the world of privacy law in Minnesota, whose Supreme Court had never before recognized a claim for invasion of privacy.
"It was a moral victory," Miller said.
But Lake, who grew up with Weber in Moorhead, a small town of about 32,000, said the episode had lingering consequences.
"It's been incredibly embarrassing to look in the eyes of the parents of kids I coach, and say, 'Yeah, I was stupid, I was naked in the shower, but it's not as bad as it sounds,' " said Lake.
Privacy expert Eric Jorstad, an attorney who teaches media law at the University of Minnesota Law School, wonders whether the Supreme Court went too far in allowing the case to go forward.
"The law protects a reasonable expectation of privacy," he said. "But the question is raised whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy" when you drop your film off to be developed.
Despite his cases, attorney Groves tends to agree. "I just can't believe these people are actually taking this stuff to the local grocery to be developed," he said.
But they do, and the results can be devastating.
"To me, it seemed like everybody was pointing and laughing," testified aspiring model Leah Coleman Mouton, then a 21-year-old nursing student who sued after she found out a Wal-Mart photo clerk had passed topless photos of her around Southern University in Baton Rouge.
A judge in 1999 ruled that Wal-Mart and the clerk had to pay $7,500 to Mouton.
Jack Dampf, Mouton's attorney, said he thinks many more photo clerks dip into the prints than ever show up in court.
"My guess is that a lot of these cases are settled out of court because people are embarrassed," he said. "They don't want people to know what was in the pictures."
Skin shots may make up the bulk of pinched prints, but there's another topic that catches some clerks' eyes: blood and guts.
Sometimes money is an incentive, as when an employee of the photo lab that processed film for the coroner's office that autopsied JonBenet Ramsey sold the pictures to a tabloid.
But in other cases, simple lurid interest is enough.
The parents of Ralph Corbitt, a Florida boy who died in 1989 from an accidental gunshot wound to the head, sued Eckerd Drugs, claiming that employees showed around the graphic photographs they were asked to develop by the Collier County Sheriff's Office.
Managers of labs such as Oakland's Camera Corner, which develops photos for the Alameda County Coroner's Office, say they take their customers' privacy very seriously.
"Anything we have extra we shred. All the people who work here know that," said owner John Hartz.
"I had a kid here once who did work in the lab. He saw the pictures and said, 'You could make a lot of money with these,' " Hartz said. "You just can't think that way."
Vartan Demirjian, owner of Oscar's Photo Lab, a small independent shop at Seventh and Brannan streets in San Francisco, also said his technicians shred any leftover prints. "They don't get put in somebody's purse or wind up on the Internet," Demirjian said. "All you need to do is blow it once to lose customers."
For her part, Lake doesn't trust any photo processors not to look through her pictures. "I've never taken a naked picture again," she said. "I feel this could have happened anywhere, at any one-hour photo place. I would warn people to definitely be careful of what others might see."