Woman loses privacy case over Bebo
pictures published in magazine
A magazine did not intrude into a young woman's privacy when it published photos that she had uploaded to social networking site Bebo when she was 15 because the images had already been widely circulated online.
The woman complained to press self-regulatory body the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). She said that an article and photographs which focused on her body intruded on her privacy and were published without her permission.
The PCC said that Loaded magazine did not invade the woman's privacy because though the original source of the pictures was her social networking profile they had appeared widely on the internet outside of that context and the magazine had not taken them directly from the Bebo page.
"The magazine had not taken the material from the complainant's Bebo site; rather it had published a piece commenting on something that had widespread circulation online (having been taken from the Bebo page sometime ago by others) and was easily accessed by Google searches," said the PCC's ruling.
"It was not a matter of dispute that images of the complainant had been freely available for some time (having been originally posted in 2006) or that she had been identified online as the person in the pictures," it said.
"The Commission could quite understand that the complainant objected strongly to the context in which they appeared online: what were images of her and her friends in a social context had become proclaimed as 'pin-up' material, the subject of innuendo and bawdy jokes," said the ruling. "The magazine had not accessed material from a personal site and then been responsible for an especially salacious means of presenting it; instead it had published a piece discussing the fact that this material was already being widely used in this way by others."
The PCC said that it felt it could not order the magazine not to use material that had been so widely circulated.
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