Dutch court orders grandmother to delete FB photos of grandkids

London, May 22
A Netherlands court has ordered a grandmother to delete Facebook and Pinterest photos of her own grandchildren after she posted them online without their parents permission.

The Dutch court made the ruling after a judge decided the case fell under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The ruling said that the grandmother must remove the photos or pay a fine of 50 euros for every day that she leaves them online, up to a maximum of 1,000 euros.

According to a BBC report, the grandmother's case ended up in court after she repeatedly refused to delete the pictures when asked by her daughter.

The GDPR, which came into force in May 2018, does not apply to 'purely personal' or 'household' processing of data.

However, this exemption did not apply to the grandmother because she had posted the photos on social media, meaning that they were available to a wider audience, the ruling said.

"With Facebook, it cannot be ruled out that placed photos may be distributed and may end up in the hands of third parties," it said.

"I think the ruling will surprise a lot of people who probably don't think too much before they tweet or post photos," Neil Brown, a technology lawyer, was quoted as saying.