On February 23, 2017, the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, the Italian Data Protection Authority (DPA), ordered a mother to delete from her Facebook feed posts containing two judgments that include private aspects of her family’s life and most of all her daughter’s life.
The DPA noted that the posted judgments allowed the identification of the minor daughter and contained private information (also related to the minor’s sexuality) relating to the family’s past and the child’s personal problems.
Even if the posts weren’t public, the DPA reasoned that they would never really be restricted to “friends”. An account holder could easily make a post public or any friend of her could share the posts and make them visible to other users (potentially all of Facebook users).
To safeguard the right to privacy of the child, the DPA ordered the deletion of the posts from the mother’s profile.
The Italian DPA’s order, Rimozione da un profilo facebook di provvedimenti giurisdizionali contenenti informazioni relative a un minore (doc. web n. 6163649), is available (in Italian) at http://www.garanteprivacy.it…
Originally published on Technethics on April 2017