When hacked photographs of celebrities were being sold on the internet in 2014, I spoke to Julia Hartley-Brewer on LBC about what a victim of that kind of breach of privacy can do to get images removed. The clip is below. The advice still stands, and the law behind it has since been strengthened in the victim’s favour, so this article sets out the position as it is now.
Do you own your own image?
Not as such. English law has no free-standing right to one’s image, and the belief that “European human rights law” gives you one is a misunderstanding. What you have instead is a set of overlapping rights that, between them, usually get the result: a right not to have private information about you misused, which is how the courts give effect to Article 8 of the European Convention; rights over your personal data, and a photograph of you is personal data; rights in the copyright of photographs you took or commissioned; and protection from harassment where the publication is part of a course of conduct. Which one to use depends on the image.
Intimate images
Sharing, or threatening to share, an intimate image of someone without their consent is a criminal offence under section 66B of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, inserted by the Online Safety Act 2023 and in force since 31 January 2024. There is no longer any need to prove that the person who shared it intended to cause distress, which was the weakness of the earlier “revenge porn” offence. Report it to the police, and in parallel report it to the platform: intimate image abuse is a priority offence under the Online Safety Act, so every platform with UK users has a duty to remove it quickly once notified. The Revenge Porn Helpline will report and chase removals on your behalf, and StopNCII lets you create a digital fingerprint of the image from your own device, without uploading it, which participating platforms then use to block it. Google will remove explicit images of you that were published without consent from its search results on request (Google’s removal policy). Where the person responsible is known, a civil injunction under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 or for misuse of private information will stop further publication and can be obtained within days.
Ordinary photographs published without consent
A photograph of you in a private setting, or of your children, or one that reveals something private about you, engages the tort of misuse of private information. The test is whether you had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the image and, if so, whether the publisher’s freedom of expression outweighs it, and the courts have applied it to a model photographed leaving a Narcotics Anonymous meeting (Campbell v MGN [2004] UKHL 22), a toddler in a pushchair in the street (Murray v Big Pictures [2008] EWCA Civ 446) and a musician’s children on a family outing (Weller v Associated Newspapers [2015] EWCA Civ 1176). A photograph taken in a public place is not automatically fair game.
Data protection gives a second, often quicker, route. A photograph from which you can be identified is your personal data, and Article 17 of the UK GDPR gives you the right to have it erased where there is no lawful basis for keeping it online. That right runs against the website that published it and, separately, against Google in respect of its search results. The Information Commissioner enforces it.
If you took the photograph, or commissioned it for private purposes, copyright is the simplest tool of all. The owner of the copyright in a photograph can require its removal from any website, and section 85 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 gives the person who commissioned a photograph for private and domestic purposes the right to stop its publication even where the photographer owns the copyright. Platforms respond to a copyright notice faster than to any other kind.
Where to start
Keep a copy of the page with the address and the date visible. Report to the platform under the right heading, because an intimate image report, a privacy report and a copyright notice go to different teams with different timescales. If the images are on several sites, or keep reappearing, or the person responsible is known to you, take advice early: an injunction binds the individual, and once it is in place the platforms treat the material as unlawful and remove it on sight. Cohen Davis handles these cases, including for clients outside the United Kingdom.
First published 1 October 2014. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.