In March 2016 the French police warned parents that their grown-up children could one day sue them for putting their security or privacy at risk through the photographs the parents had posted on Facebook and elsewhere when the children were small. Many parents in this country asked what the law here says about placing children’s images on the internet. I discussed it with Shelagh Fogarty on LBC; the conversation is below, and the law as it now stands follows.
Is there a right to one’s own image?
Not as a free-standing right in English law, and this article originally overstated the position when it described a new right created by the European Court of Human Rights in 2012. What the Strasbourg court has said, in a line of cases involving Princess Caroline von Hannover and a Greek family whose newborn was photographed in a clinic, is that a person’s image is one of the chief attributes of their personality, that it reveals their unique characteristics, and that control over it is an essential component of personal development; publishing someone’s image therefore engages the right to private life in Article 8 of the Convention (Reklos and Davourlis v Greece, 2009; von Hannover v Germany (No 2), 2012). In England that principle is given effect through the tort of misuse of private information, and the Court of Appeal has applied it to photographs of children: J K Rowling’s toddler in a pushchair in an Edinburgh street (Murray v Big Pictures [2008] EWCA Civ 446) and Paul Weller’s children on a family outing (Weller v Associated Newspapers [2015] EWCA Civ 1176). A child has a reasonable expectation of privacy in images of their private life, and that expectation does not depend on the child’s consent, which a small child cannot give.
Could a child sue a parent?
In theory, yes. The child’s right to privacy is the child’s, not the parent’s, and a parent who publishes images that the child, grown up, has good reason to want unpublished, and which have by then been copied by strangers, has done exactly what the tort of misuse of private information exists to remedy. The possibility that an image posted on Facebook could be copied or downloaded is real and has been known to every parent all along. No such claim has yet been reported in England, and the courts would give great weight to the ordinary, loving reasons for which parents share photographs, but the principle is there. What the child certainly has is a right to be forgotten: a photograph from which a person can be identified is their personal data, and the UK GDPR gives the person a right to have it erased by any website or platform that holds it. That right runs against Facebook, Instagram and the rest, not against the parent, because a parent’s own posts on their own account fall within the exemption for purely personal or household activity (Article 2). France, whose police started this debate, has since legislated: Law 2024-120 of 19 February 2024 makes the protection of a child’s image part of parental responsibility, requires both parents to agree to publication, and lets a court intervene where a parent’s sharing harms the child’s dignity or integrity. England has no equivalent, and the Online Safety Act 2023 regulates the platforms, not the parents.
So should parents think twice?
I think so, but there are opinions to the contrary, and the LBC conversation above has both. Images of a child in a private setting, showing where they live or go to school, or which the child would plainly not want shown to strangers at fifteen, are the ones to keep off public profiles. The rest is a matter of judgement, and the law, for now, leaves that judgement to the parent.
First published 3 March 2016. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.