A judge from the Netherlands had ruled that a grandmother should delete all photos of her grandchildren that were posted online without receiving the permission from the children’s mother.
CNN reports that the daughter had asked her mother to delete photos of the children that were posted online on websites such as Facebook and Pinterest. After her mother did not respond to multiple requests, the daughter took the case to court, where the judged rule in favor of her.
The judge accepted the mother’s claim that the uploading of pictures without her consent can severely violate the privacy of the young children. In particular, the court ruled that the grandmother had no legal right to post the pictures online and thus share them with online users.
Therefore, whereas possessing pictures or sharing them among a limited, private group would not violate the law, sharing them online without an explicit permission from the legal representatives of the minors does.
Moreover, the court ruled that the possibilities that the images shared on social media networks may be used by third parties also constitutes a further legal violation. In fact, the rules and regulations of many pages does state that images uploaded on their websites may be used by others.
All in all, the judge ruled that the grandmother should delete all pictures of her grandchildren within 10 days. Should she not comply with the ruling, she is to be fined 50 euros ($55) each day with a maximum set at a 1,000 euros ($1,100).
Although the numbers seems harsh, it is a watered down version of what the mother originally called for. The mother had originally asked that a daily fine of 250 euros be imposed for everyday the pictures were not deleted.
The regulation in the middle of this case was the EU General Data Protection Regulation that was ratified by member nations in 2018. It was signed as a response after various instances of companies, including Facebook, selling private information surfaced.
The core objective of the regulation is essentially to give more ownership to private information and regulate the amount and ways in which companies can request and handle sensitive information. CNN reports that the core value of the regulation was the idea of “Privacy by default”.
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Replaced!