I’m not supposed to be working today but while on BlogTV this morning I did manage to fire off this rant about peoples expectations of privacy when they publish pictures and information onto the web and more specifically social networks.
This rant was brought on by reading a BBC article about the British Press Complaints Commission waning to set guidelines for how the press handles information gleaned from social networking sites.
The use of material taken from personal profiles on social networks by newspapers is to be the subject of a major consultation undertaken by industry watchdog the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).
This comes in the wake of increasingly numbers of newspaper stories that include images and text taken from sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook.
But the subjects of press reports are not always happy with the use of content they have uploaded.
Tim Toulmin, director of the PCC, in an interview with BBC Radio 4 says the organisation was getting complaints from people about material, “that is being republished when they themselves are the subject of news stories”.
Mr Toulmin says it would be useful to establish principles to guide the press in their use of social network content.
“It’s down to the PCC to set the boundaries in a common sense way about what sort of information it is acceptable to re-publish,” he says.
Here’s a direct link to the video in case you can’t see the embedded version above.