A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the London event of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). During my panel, I outlined a few scenarios where there were problems with privacy. The first one was  about a person who was very open and didn’t have many privacy requirements. This person was murdered and the media descended on their open data, putting their photos in the paper to the extreme distress of the family.

A very real example of this happened last week. In a very sad case, a father discovered his two babies dead at home. The Daily Mail subsequently took pictures from Facebook of the father, the mother and both babies and printed them in this article. How is this acceptable? Even if their Facebook settings were such that the pictures were not private to them, I fail to see how it is in the public interest to post the pictures of the babies? This can only have compounded the sorrow for a devastated family.