A motorist who took photographs of a traffic accident he passed, and then published the images on social media, has been charged by police.
Police legally pursued the man after relatives of people involved in the crash made a complaint about the images, Ritzau reports.
The accident in question occurred on March 12th this year when a passing motorist took pictures of a van that had been involved in an accident, police superintendent Lasse B. Rasmussen of Southern Jutland Police confirmed.
A citizen later sent the images to police.
“We received a report about this from a citizen who saw it on Facebook,” Rasmussen said.
“The accused has told us he decided to delete [the photos from Facebook] after a few hours. So we could not find the post ourselves, but a citizen sent it to us,” he added.
Police found the pictures so graphic that the responsible individual may have broken the law by publishing them, Rasmussen said.
“Based on our assessment, this was a breach of the law,” he said.
“Specifically, this was not a picture of a person but of a vehicle that was unusually badly damaged – it was crushed between two trucks,” he added.
Surely the vehicle cannot have any privacy rights, can it, so how is this a breach of law? What if the license plate number is not even visible? Does that make any difference? Is this a breach because likelihood of linking the vehicle to the owner/passengers was high?
I’m confused at what to Danish law enforcement seems to be a clearcut matter:
“In this case, images have been distributed showing people’s private circumstances, and it should be obvious this kind of thing should not be made public,” he said.
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