A court in the Netherlands has ruled that a grandmother must delete the photographs of her grandchildren that she posted to Facebook and Pinterest without their parents’ permission due to Europe’s GDPR laws on data privacy.
BBC News reports that a Netherlands court has ruled that a grandmother must delete the photographs of her grandchildren that she posted to Facebook and Pinterest without their parents’ permission. The case ended up in court after a fight between the woman and her daughter.
A judge ruled that the matter was within the scope of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). One expert on the matter stated that the ruling reflected the “position that the European Court has taken over many years.”
The case was taken to court after the grandmother of the children refused to delete photographs of the children posted to social media. The mother of the children repeatedly requested that the children’s pictures be deleted but the grandmother refused.
The GDPR does not apply to “purely personal” or “household” processing of data but this exemption did not apply in this case as posting photographs on social media made them available to a larger audience.
The court stated that: “With Facebook, it cannot be ruled out that placed photos may be distributed and may end up in the hands of third parties.” The woman was ordered to remove the photos or pay a €50 ($54.41) fine for every day that the photos remain on the platform, with a maximum fine of €1,000 ($1,090.27 ). If more images of the children are posted in the future, she will be fined ane extra €50 per day.
Neil Brown, a technology lawyer at Decoded Legal, commented: “I think the ruling will surprise a lot of people who probably don’t think too much before they tweet or post photos. Irrespective of the legal position, would it be reasonable for the people who’ve posted those photos to think, ‘Well, he or she doesn’t want them out there anymore’?”
Brown added: “Actually, the reasonable thing — the human thing to do — is to go and take them down.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.