Grandmother ordered to delete Facebook photos under GDPR
bbc.com
bbc.com
Taking non-macro or identifying photos, especially of the residents or other guests, would be quite rude without advance permission.
I grant that many of my friends and associates may be more privacy-oriented than most, but it isn’t just tech/nerds-who-use-Tor.
Some people expect immediate replies to their text messages. This is a big problem with current teens, where their parents will demand this from them. But even some adults do this with other adults. Some people adapt to this by learning they need to respond to every message asap or else! Other people are more willing to treat phone messaging as something that is strictly asynchronous. I think most people are between these two extremes and vary on a case by case basis.
There also isn't consistent norms with how much phone use is acceptable in front of other people. Some tolerate nearly none (see the person you responded to). Some tolerate use motivated by the social situation (eg you look up something directly related to a conversation). Some tolerate only responding to VIPs (spouse, children). Some tolerate any kind of use as long as it isn't too much (I perceive this to be the most common, but it is also the vaguest). Some tolerate unlimited use (I've seen entire tables of people together at a restaurant on their phones the entire time).
One aspect that I find... disappointing is that an individual person's position on the first issue may not be compatible with the second issue. I know some people who would both demand only social motivated phone use when with others, but also demand immediate responses to their messages. To me these seem fundamentally incompatible.
There also doesn't seem to be a social custom of replying that you are with others and won't be particularly responsive for a while.
The worst version of it that I've experienced is a person who unilaterally decides to grant themselves unrestricted use of the phone, while simultaneously demanding I stick to minimum/social-situation use only. This assymetry annoys the hell out of me, and I've had some heated arguments about it. I don't mind if someone is glued to their phone, but I expect to be treated no worse than the person expects to be treated themselves.
We don't have kids but I do not want photos of myself posted to Facebook. Family meetings are always super uncomfortable. Some family members tell me in advance they will not upload the picture to Facebook but other people simply get upset with me.
You'd have to ask them or their lawyer why they pursued action this way. I suspect from the context in the article that it was a recurring issue, and the article mentions that it wasn't just posts on Facebook, either.
If FB did not defer to another party, they would have to determine if the accusing party has the legal grounds to demand the pictures are removed.
How would FB know that those are the parent's kids? Or that the parents have custody? Or any other nuanced edge case?
It's best for everyone if FB defers to the bodies that defined these laws for judgement. Otherwise, you'll end up in a system like YouTube where copyright protections are easily abused against small organizations that can't fight back.
The only abuse case I can imagine would be online bullying, there's little financial incentive like in your YouTube example. And for Facebook, refusing a legitimate act could carry fines while deleting a pic involves little risk.
Deleting a user's picture incorrectly is absolutely a problem. You now have an avenue for malicious actors to effectively DDOS users by removing all of their photographs with these GDPR requests
My entire post was just detailing the US system already in place, where they have the powers you described. These malicious actors could only target people under the age of thirteen, there would be little incentive to do such except bullying, and the culprit would like face punishment.
I would hate to see it happen to any child personally, but from Facebook's position there is no risk to them taking it down while leaving the picture up could carry a $40,000 fine.
This system has existed for all of Facebook's history, and doesn't seem to he a huge source of problems. It's abusable, but it takes a decent amount of work, the risk is rather high, and there is no payoff for abusing it. No matter how little we like the system, it functions fine
I'd guess they went through the courts to prevent future pictures on Facebook or other social media sites.
That generally means that in the US unless there is some law that specifically says otherwise, this kind of dispute is between whoever posted the information and whoever wants it taken down. The hosting site can take it down on their own if they wish, but they do not have to.
Does Europe have anything similar to section 230?
If Mom says no, why should Grandma be allowed to publically(!) post photos, for the whole world to see?
Edit: keep in mind that at least in my country you need permission from the person depicted when publishing a photo of him (with exceptions for important events, important people and so on).
And parents act in stead of the child, legally. When the parents say "no", legally the child has said no.
However her mother does not respect our wishes and we occasionally find something she posted online or used when teaching a class. It's very annoying, but we just argue with her when she does it rather than doing something legal.
> Person A ordered to remove pictures of person B from facebook.
That's legal? That's not a blatant free speech issue?
(This isn't to say Grandma isn't being an asshole by posting them, but generally you have a right to be an asshole)
Edit: I just want to say I'm pretty happy with the discussion this post generated :) Also, it's been bouncing around from -4 to 0 points repeatedly.
I think this is the best, most succinct summation of the global free speech and privacy issue.
You're free to not really respect the privacy of others, provided you are in a jurisdiction that allows you to do so. This hypothetical jurisdiction however, would not be Europe.
For example if you are in the US and operate a website in the US and get a visitor from the EU then the GDPR may apply to you with respect to that visitor.
The question is then one of enforceability but that's the reason why some American websites have GDPR notices or restrict access to visitors from the EU.
Besides, there are plenty of ways as an American I can force you to remove a photo without it being “blatant free speech” issue. Copyright and trademark come to mind, NDAs too.
In Europe we generally don't. In Germany we certainly don't.
We have a doctrine of "practical concordance" where all basic rights limit each other and have to be weighed such that all basic rights achieve maximal effect. In a way we're looking for a global maximum, not a local "free speech trumps personal rights" solution.
And on another note: I always find it rich when Americans complain about that. America specifically forged our constitution that way. Free speech was not very important post-war, when de-nazification called for banning books, closing all newspapers, licensing newspapers by publishers who were politically "right".
You got that right back then, I'm not complaining about that. But if you had wanted full American Free Speech in Germany, you could have implemented it with a stroke of a pen. Don't blame us now.
Absolute free speech is a flawed concept anyways and even America acknowledges that with the legal concept of hate speech.
There are other instances like swearing on TV.
The radio spectrum is regulated by the FCC. If you want to broadcast on it, you have to get a license and abide by the rules. The FCC has many rules about the content of radio communications including the frequency, the modulation, the maximum transmit power, and yes the content. For example: amateur radio & citizen's band communications can't be encrypted. But even when it comes to broadcast TV, some swearing is allowed. And you can swear as much as you want on cable or streaming services.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Liberti...
People are allowed to have opinions in opposition to that of the sitting government, including ones that sat well before we were even born.
Yes, but they need to justify them. Disregarding tradition goes both ways. You can't brush off the German conception of the law and then just go "well that's censorship bro", which is honestly 90% of the discourse on HN on these issues.
The notion of a 'concordance of legal values' is highly intuitive. There's a very strong case to be made that laws are not sacred, that they serve the public good, and thus ought to be balanced. It's the free speech absolutism that is purely an artefact of American culture, practised virtually nowhere else to this degree.
They are not alleging that the photos were taken against the parents' (or children's) will. It seems to imply that a person carries a perpetual license on their likeness.
Maybe that children are involved makes this case special (unclear here). Or maybe someone who liked a photo of themselves one day gets to demand it be taken down later. Imagine a couple dating put up a photo. They break up and a couple years later one is getting married and demands the other takes down that photo.
Likeness rights are likeness rights. Nothing to do with free speech. For IP law reasons, people don't have a right to distribute pictures with your likeness in them, unless you explicitly grant them that right. (If things didn't work this way, the modelling industry would collapse.)
Commercial documentaries have images of people who didn't give consent all the time.
>For IP law reasons, people don't have a right to distribute pictures with your likeness in them, unless you explicitly grant them that right.
Of course they do. Every newspaper does it every day.
>(If things didn't work this way, the modelling industry would collapse.)
People can nonetheless charge for sitting for a photo shoot. And the use of images in marketing/advertising contexts (e.g. in an ad, in a company brochure) does indeed require explicit permission. You also get into publicity rights etc. of famous people.
But if I take a street photo of you and illustrate my blog with it or publish it in a book of my photos? I absolutely don't need permission for a photo otherwise obtained lawfully.
It's more about royalties. The professional modelling industry (of any kind—hand models, for an unusual example) would be unsustainable if the only payment were direct work-for-hire. Models need to make money from downstream uses of their likeness, just like people who produce music need to make money from downstream sampling of their song. Otherwise, the most profitable position would become that of the "sampler" (who, after all, wouldn't need to license anything, and so would get their source material for free!), strangling out those who rely on original licensed material, and thus killing any demand for those who produce such material.
> Every newspaper does it every day.
The thing that journalists and documentarists are doing, in such cases (though not all—they often do license!) is fair use. And fair use is a defense, not a legal justification (i.e. it's like murder in self-defense, not like executing someone as part of your legal duties as a state executioner.) In other words, doing something under fair use does not protect you from getting sued; it just means you potentially have a good argument to use, if-and-when you do get sued.
Yes, oftentimes certain types of likeness rights are "obvious fair use." For example, a picture taken of a place, where that place contains a crowd—the photographer is unlikely to attempt to acquire likeness rights for anybody in the crowd. But technically, any one of those people could still sue for an infringement of their likeness rights.
Now, normally, such a crowd-member who sued wouldn't win... but if the person in the crowd was an "ex-celebrity" who'd gone into hiding and had made a statement that they didn't want to be in the public eye any more; and the paparazzist took the photo specifically because the ex-celebrity was in the crowd, with the intent of printing it out on the side of a building and highlighting with a spotlight just the little bit of it where the person is? They'd have a very good case. Even though it's still "a picture of a crowd, in public."
As well, you lose any notion of this implicit "obvious" fair-use defense, when you're no longer taking pictures of public places. A nudist beach, for example? Usually they've legally arranged to be considered "public-access private commercial facilities." You have no fair-use defense for pictures taken there, any more than you do for pictures taken inside a Starbucks.
A home is a private place. Grandma isn't taking street photos. In fact, without an explicit grant of rights, she's not just infringing upon the subject's likeness rights; she's surveilling private property. Just like most retail stores say you are, if you go in and take pictures of the shelves.
Person A wants to put a photograph of Person B on facebook. Person B does not want their image on facebook.
Person A has a right to freedom of expression. Person B has a right to privacy. These two rights are in conflict in this case.
It's not that we're not respecting freedom of expression - it's simply not that absolute. It's that we're drawing the line between one person's rights and another's, and Europe often draws that line in different places than the US does.
But be clear - both A and B have rights here. The only way to be absolute about one person's rights is to disregard the other's.
Why oh why does absolutely everything have to boil down to "free speech"?
Do you want to only have one human right? Free speech but no other rights?
People have the right to a private life as well as the right to freedom of expression and a list of other rights (the right to life, the right to a fair trial etc. etc.) and often these rights conflict.
In this case it's the right to a private life and the right to freedom of expression.
Neither right trumps the other, having both is important for society to function well.
And when the right balance between them is struck, actually having the right to a private life can protect the freedom of expression.
As an example: If one thinks anything and everything they say is _likely_ to be published publicly or to an authority that might then be prejudiced against them then they're likely to self-censor.
That's bad for free speech.
But if one has the right to a private life and is thus in control of what they say then they're less likely to self-censor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
In effect, the law has no leverage against children, except insofar as children can be influenced through their parents. If the parent were the one suing—because the parent also has no leverage—then nobody has leverage.
And if they're in such a situation, then what do they expect the state to do? The state, in the end, only relies on their leverage. (Except in certain exceptional circumstances, like if a child is reported as being suicidal.)
This is not a hypothetical case, older minors can overwhelm physically their parents (or grandparents, usual when parents are drug addicts) and sometimes the children are very difficult to deal, maybe they have a personality disorder.
https://ncac.org/project/youth-free-expression-program/sexti...
So in this case, yes, a child can be punished for posting pictures of themselves, financially and worse. Otherwise (even in Europe?) I doubt it.
Posting them on Facebook is exactly that but 1,000x worse, but it's "normal" so we have a debate about whether it's right for them to ask her to stop.
Was it a public post or private?
BBC doesn't even seem to understand the issue at hand.
Public/The court didn't know - http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2020/05/privacy-rights-and-soci...
This is not relevant to the article, why can't we just talk about the article. There are plenty of other articles on HN about privacy within applications.
The court specifically mentioned the 'general public'
"The court acknowledged that "it cannot be excluded" that placing a picture on a Facebook or Pinterest page might be exempted from GDPR scrutiny on the basis of this provision, but held that it had not been established that A's pages were inaccessible to the general public."
When you publish on Twitter or Facebook publicly you are no different to a newspaper, you are publishing to the public record.
The BBC clearly doesn't get this, which I assume means a lot of the general public doesn't either with such lousy media.
Why do you think you should have the right to review the photos that other people uploaded, whether or not you've blocked them?
And therefore there is a purpose to having it taken down.
But in the thread next door everyone is screaming that social media companies have complete, absolute and unchecked power over all forms of human communication and expression, and that when someone is deplatformed or their channel is banned, they and their content are all but permanently erased from human society.
Or is this because the subjects are minors? Or some other technicality, like whether or not the photos were taken in a public place or similar?
We can only hope. No one has the right to post a picture of me on the internet anywhere ever for any reason.
If I take a photo of a crowd at an NBA game and publish it in a book of NBA photos, should any member of that crowd be able to force the publisher to stop selling the book until they've removed the photo? If not, why should it work differently on the internet?
If you're in public then you don't, generally, have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but if you're at home or at work then it's a different story.
As far as I'm aware, though, this hasn't been tested in court since the GDPR has come in to effect, but I would be surprised if the (UK) GDPR is not interpreted with that principal if and when it does.
pictures of a crowd don't give individual people depicted any rights, unless they are somehow the focus of the picture (say portrait shot with a crowd in the background).
Also, when you take a photo of a building the passer-by doesn't get rights to demand you not publish it, if he is merely an insignificant chance addition.
Unsurprisingly, all those "easy edge cases" that internet commenters believe to have found as the first person ever have already been thought through and handled.
Photographing in public for the sole purpose of taking a photo from you? No.
Here in Germany you are allowed to take photos in public, but you may not publish them in all circumstances. If a person is somewhere in the background it's fine. Also if it's a person of public interest. But you can not just follow anyone in public, take photos of them specificially and publish them. You may be required to take them down. Personality rights exist even in public.
> or posting images which are public record such as mugshots/booking photos?
In Germany (and many other countries) mugshots are not public records.
Nothing was stopping people from taking your picture and posting it around town, or in a classified ad or something before, nothing's going to stop people from doing it now.
The best thing to do is decide if it's a picture really worth being upset about existing and if it is, kindly talk to the people who posted it, otherwise it's probably not worth worrying about.
People that knowingly smile for a photo aren't really the people complaining.
Would you like picture of you posted by your family member on company's X platform to be used by company X for marketing purposes? I get your family member may not mind if their own pictures are used but you were never asked for permission. Would you want to be asked for permission?
What if you've not seen the photo, don't know who took the photo, or who posted it, or where they posted it?
Last year I had a drink with a group of friends in a pub, commemorating the untimely death of a friend one year before.
The following day, at work, a manager who wasn't present the night before asked me about the event the previous evening. He said he'd seen me "in the photos" on Facebook.
I'm not on Facebook, so I've no idea who took - or who posted - photos.
Suggestions?
Decide whether it's worth worrying about and if not, don't?
Was your boss angry about it? Or were they just making conversation about it?
One of those is worth worrying about, the other may be annoying but doesn't matter.
You can't control people. I dunno, even before everyone had cameras on them all the time I was taught to assume everything I did in public could be seen and maybe even be recorded by anyone, my dad was a bit paranoid, he taught me this as a child long before cell phones became ubiquitous. It's just the way it is. If you're in a public place, people can see you, people have cameras, the internet exists.
Again, I agree, I dislike pictures of me existing randomly, I try to avoid it. I'll dodge cameras and shit if I see someone taking pictures. But I know, inevitably, there's not much i can do about it. But I also realize, people tend to have short attention spans and memories and live in their own worlds so in the end it doesn't really matter and most people don't care enough to remember some random picture they seen of me anyway.
But I know some people who believe that a workaround involves both you and the information being physically in the US, and the information not actually being displayed anywhere in Europe. I don't know if such a case has actually been litigated, but I'd wager you'd be OK in that scenario.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2014/dec/04/i-cant...
Right, so it’s not as absolute as the original comment made it sound.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_privacy_con... for issues that arose in practice from pictures taken in public by Google.
That people are so casual about what they post publicly online is nuts. That sites that exist pretty much solely to enable that bad judgement keep operating is nuts.
Personally I prefer the default to be legality, and make exceptions for things we want to be illegal, rather than reverse.
There's obviously more weight put on the freedom of expression side of the argument when it concerns journalistic endeavours than, say, a grandmother wanting to post pictures of her kids.
It goes against what we've been used to on-line, but it does make sense. Even without GDPR, I'd say basic manners would oblige you to take a photo down if a person featured on it asked you to.
But the way GDPR is written someone could come back years later, having changed their mind, and have a picture taken down. Perhaps a couple broke up and one party wants all photos with them together removed. I suppose that's OK, but implies a kind of curation (and an obligation) that isn't always easy.
The second is random passers-by who appear unintentionally (by all parties) the background of photos. On one hand, what expectation of tangental privacy should you have when you're out in the option and people can see you with their eyes? On the other hand, permitting this seems like it would open a mass surveillance loophole.
I can imagine a relatively easy fix for the latter, which is an automatic blur filter for those who aren't the "subject" of a photo, similar to what street view uses.
The grandmother could have argued legitimate interest (she is a grandmother and took care of one of the children) and have demonstrated limited visibility (now there was no mention of posting publically or not, so the judge went with publically) and the case would have started to get interesting.
Now it was just a slam dunk. No permission, no argument for use case under GDPR, done.
[1] https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id=ECLI:NL:...
That is the whole point of privacy laws! It's like saying that laws against theft cost you so much money since they make you pay in the supermarket.
I have never heard of the long tradition of grandmothers publishing their grandchildrens' photos in a newspaper or handing out photo leaflets.
They usually show those pictures to a few friends. In person. In their photo album at home.
(The GDPR doesn't cover that, obviously, because it is meant to address the rather new phenomenon of world-wide audiences)
The internet is relatively young; there is no “tradition” of grandmothers posting pictures of their grandchildren on Facebook publicly (not just to “friends”).
Online privacy is an entirely different beast. The world is still iterating on how to deal with it.
An analogy in scrapbook terms would be if grandma walked into a public square and put photos of her grandchildren onto a billboard, and every person who walked up to see them can peel off a copy, with no limit to the number of copies that can be peeled off this way.
Also, few years ago, grandma needed to be given picture by parents. She would not snap picture parents did not wanted, because cameras were not something you normally have with you all the time.
I was comfortable being naked around people I knew and trusted.
My grandparents didn't always give a shit about my comfort levels and shared pictures of me in various states of dress with others.
I think I should have a clear and cut right to decide if I'm comfortable or not. Especially when I voiced those concerns as a kid.
>processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.
So where there is any doubt one must test the idea that the data subject's rights outweigh one's legitimate interests.
My overall point is that simply claiming "Legitimate Interest!" is not a free pass to do whatever you want.
She posted pictures of grandchildren against their mother's wishes. She's just being selfish, and the fact that she's a grandmother isn't really germane to anything.
She's referred to as "grandmother" to indicate the relationship which is relevant to the story and the presumable toxicity of the situation.
But the story could be read as the daughter spiting her mother by making her take down photos she was happy with before the fall out.
I'm not claiming that's what happened - maybe they fell out because of this - just saying we shouldn't rush to judgement on her motivation for pushing back.
I would disagree that it is the role of the government to enforce this.
It'd be irrelevant if she was posting data she'd got e.g. from her job.
Does that mean you can just write a check to not be covered by the GDPR?
Does that mean fines are checks you can write to not be covered by the law?
It has always seemed obnoxious to me, the choice being made on somebody else's behalf to consign their privacy to the dustbin for eternity through this method.
This seems like a straightforward application of this, and more importantly gives the children power to control what information of them is on the internet.
The European legal landscape is perfectly fine and gives children the right to put a limit on what their (grand)parents can do with their image. It protects the privacy of children, which honestly shouldn't even be controversial.
My picture is mine. Not the person who took the picture.
I hate family members who think they're somehow entitled to me and my body and my face. Like no. I will be the person deciding what I'm comfortable with.
I'm glad to see EU taking the necessary steps here.
This is the legal regime that enables a lot of journalism, good and bad.
The US has been the driving force behind this before, times have changed.
Social media sites are mined for photos to be used for facial recognition apps. While you're concerned about the slippery slope of being able to post what you want online, companies and individuals right now are using your photo in ways you probably didn't imagine. I don't think it's clear cut.
Nope. Most countries have rights of image/personal rights in their laws
Maybe you don't care about it. But others do. And laws are for protecting everyone. There are lots of factors involved and many aspects to consider. Your conclusion of a "sane legal system" with only one exceptional circumstance "like revealing medical information" is just trivial and naive.
So I could just follow you around taking pictures of your face, kids, family, work, house, car, and then post a big beautiful album online since I would have... the copyright? You're ok with that, right? What a crazy legal landscape the US is.