Not even the mayor can post pictures of minors and disabled people on social networks

A mayor may not publish on his own social pages pictures and videos of minors, disabled and disadvantaged people, or of alleged offenders. The Court of Cassation has thus upheld the Privacy Guarantor's appeal against the former mayor of Messina Cateno De Luca. The Authority requested and obtained the annulment, with referral, of the sentence with which the Court had cancelled the maximum fine of 50 thousand euros against De Luca. The first citizen had been 'punished' by the Guarantor for having published on his Facebook profile a video with images of people filmed in the clear, in an evident condition of economic-social difficulty, apparently camped out on the ground, during the evacuation of a city building. And this without specific reasons of public interest such as to justify their identification.

An image of a disabled boy, associated with a copy of an administrative decision to grant his parents a parking space in the vicinity of their house - with a visible address - was also in the Authority's sights, accompanied by a post in a tone of insult against the employees of the authority, in which the mayor demanded that the procedure for granting the parking space permit be completed quickly.

The Charter of Treviso was also violated with the publication of a video and images of minors, broadcast in the clear, to publicise the situation of discomfort and degradation, created by the city 'slums', all linked to a post describing the particular family and health conditions of a little girl, whose image was taken in a video published again without being obscured.

For the Court, however, the sanction against De Luca had to be annulled because 'the publications had taken place in the performance of a task ofpublic interest or connected with the exercise of public powers vested in the data controller, being the mayor of the Municipality of Messina himself'. A condition that, according to the judges of merit, exempted the first citizen from the rules imposed on journalists, starting with compliance with thePrivacy Code and the Treviso Charter signed by the Order of Journalists to protect the anonymity and confidentiality of data and images relating to minors.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court clarified that 'the processing of personal data is attributable to the exercise of public powers only when it is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or connected with the exercise of public powers vested in the data controller'. In the specific case, there was no task of public interest and the publications had not taken place through the institutional social channels of the municipality, but on Cateno De Luca's personal Facebook profile, in which events and information from his private life were also hosted.