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A court in the Netherlands ruled this month that a grandmother must remove pictures of her grandchildren from her social media accounts after her daughter filed a privacy complaint.
The grandmother, according to a Gelderland District Court summary, has not been in contact with her daughter for more than a year due to a family argument.
Her daughter has three minor children who appear in pictures the grandmother posted to social media accounts on Facebook and Pinterest. In February, the daughter wrote to her mother, noting that her requests made via the police to remove the photos of her children from social media have been ignored and giving her mother until March 5 to comply or face legal action.
After the grandmother failed to take the photos down, the mother took her complaint to court.
The Dutch implementation of Europe's General Data Protection Act requires that anyone posting photos of minors obtain consent from their legal guardians.
When the court took up the matter in April, the grandmother had removed photos, except for one from Facebook. She wanted that one picture, of the grandson she had cared for from April 2012 through April 2019 while the boy and his father, separated from the mother, lived with her.
The father in the instance of the Facebook image also did not consent to the publication of the image.
[...] Accordingly, the judge gave the grandmother ten days to remove the picture. If it isn't not removed by then, a fine of €50.00 (£45, $55) will be imposed each day the images remain in place, up to a maximum of €1,000 (£900, $1,095).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Monday May 25 2020, @10:23AM
Ask a lawyer - maybe you could get some sort of restraining order. Certainly, if the parents/guardians ask Granny to stop, then she should - no ifs or buts. The church would almost certainly take down the pictures if asked by the parents and in the 21st century most reputable schools wouldn't put up photos without consent (even pre-GDPR).
Thing is, though, Granny can only show her photos to a few dozen people. They're not going to be accessible in Darkest Madeupistan. There are no bots searching the purses of the world's grandmas for pervert-friendly photos. They're not going to get seen by abusive ex-partner when Arsebook auto-tags them their original names. Granny's polaroids aren't going to end up as Fake Cancer Kids in an email scam or as the poster children for an anti-vax campaign. They're not going to go viral because one of the kids looks like baby Yoda. They're not going to be Embarrassing Constipation Meme Kids on a million tweets. When Granny shows some poor victim a baby photo, she doesn't implicitly grant that person non-exclusive rights to copy and use that image for commercial purposes.
The scale, and potential for abuse, of electronic data is orders of magnitude beyond what was possible with physical media. That's why it needs different laws.