Seems like this is just a clumsy way of simply saying they are going to contact the administrator of the domain your account is associated with (which may be your employer, school, etc.)
"the BBC may use your personal information to inform relevant third parties such as your employer, school email/internet provider"
If your comment was what they intended, they would have just referred to "e-mail provider".
Compare Google's Privacy policy:
> We will share personal information with companies, organisations or individuals outside Google if we have a belief in good faith that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:
> + meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
> + enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
Or Facebook's:
> We may also access, preserve and share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to: detect, prevent and address fraud and other illegal activity; to protect ourselves, you and others, including as part of investigations; or to prevent death or imminent bodily harm.
Or Apple's:
> We may also disclose information about you if we determine that disclosure is reasonably necessary to enforce our terms and conditions or protect our operations or users.
Or Reddit's:
> We may share information if we believe your actions are inconsistent with our user agreements, rules, or other Reddit policies, or to protect the rights, property, and safety of ourselves and others;
Ironically, the BBC is somewhat clearer about whom the information might end up being disclosed to.
I sure hope that's legal!
Having run a publicly facing messageboard for many years (no auth, just plain old "write what you want (within reason"), we were able to effectively keep the level of spam and abuse off the site with cultural norms within the user base.
In one case, we had someone specifically trolling people on the site. We were able to track the poster back to a particular university in Ireland who we notified via their abuse channel (abuse@domain.xxx I think) with a very generic query:
"we're seeing someone from your network posting crap like this <link to content>. can you investigate?"
The behaviour stopped pretty quickly afterwards...
Turns out most network operators want to run a network that benefits all it's users. If you abuse that privilege, they have no qualms with disconnecting you!!