A right to privacy?

The Register report the case of the woman who has lost her privacy case for a rather odd reason:

'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.'

This case has caused much debate and I must admit that the verdict does seem odd to me.

This extract seems odd:

'"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.'

But this seems wilfully bizarre:

'The PCC said that the article and the fact that she had been 15 years old when the photos were taken meant that it was in poor taste, but that that was not in breach of its Code.'

Most strange and in case you are wondering this is the 'Epic boobs' girl...


Acid Cow has more details.