• Statistics 2010
• Key rulings 2010
  • Introduction
  • Accuracy
  • Privacy
  • Online privacy
  • Intrusion into grief and suicide reporting
  • Children
  • Undercover reporting
  • Discrimination
  • Financial journalism

Key rulings 2010

Online privacy

1. In May 2010, the Commission was asked to rule on the publication of a number of photographs of a young woman - labelled the 'Epic Boobs girl' - in Loaded magazine. The photographs had originally been uploaded by the complainant to her Bebo page in 2006 but had since been taken from there and published without permission across numerous websites. She said that the article, which offered readers financial reward for encouraging her to do a photoshoot for the magazine, had caused her upset and embarrassment.

   The magazine focused its response on the extremely wide circulation of the images on the internet: the complainant's photograph came up in the top three hits in a Google image search on the word 'boobs'. At the time of complaint, there were 1,760,000 matches that related to her and 203,000 image matches of her as the 'Epic Boobs' girl. It had not taken the photographs from the complainant's Bebo site.

   While the Commission sympathised with the complainant, it did not consider that the article was intrusive. The magazine had not taken information out of context from a social networking site, but had discussed material that had already been made widely available for a considerable time. It was not possible 'to censure the magazine for commenting on material already given a wide circulation, and which had already been contextualised in the same specific way, by many others'. The complaint was not upheld.