An Ottawa woman has been awarded $4,000 after she successfully argued her privacy was violated when footage of her jogging was used in a commercial without her consent in a legal first for Ontario.
In 2014, the woman was jogging along the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway in Ottawa’s Westboro neighbourhood when she noticed a videographer filming in the area. She said she attempted to hide her face at the time.
A year later, the woman discovered the clip of her jogging in a promotional ad for a residential condo project in Westboro. In a series of emails, she asked Waterbridge Creative Media, the media production company that produced the commercial, to remove her from the video. The company refused, arguing that using video or photos taken in public is standard industry practice.
The woman took Waterbridge Creative Media to court where the judge ruled in her favour. In the decision, the judge ruled that people have a right to not be filmed for commercial purposes when they are out in public.
The Ottawa woman was awarded $4,000 in damages for the violation of her privacy and another $100 for what the judge estimated would have been the cost for the company to hire an actor to jog in the video.
Paul Champ, the lawyer for the woman, told CTV Ottawa on Wednesday that the case sets a precedent for privacy laws in Ontario.
“In the age of social media, everyone has a high-quality video camera in their pocket,” he said. “I think people don’t recognize that they should be respecting people’s privacy rights. I think there’s going to be future cases where we’ll see where the boundaries are in using videos from public spaces.”
With files from CTV Ottawa’s Leah Larocque
