Woman loses privacy case over Bebo pictures published in magazine

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.

The woman complained to press self-regulatory body the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). She said that an article and photographs which focused on her body intruded on her privacy and were published without her permission.

The PCC said that Loaded magazine did not invade the woman’s privacy because though the original source of the pictures was her social networking profile they had appeared widely on the internet outside of that context and the magazine had not taken them directly from the Bebo page.