The limits of protection: why confidentiality doesn't apply to personal images uploaded online

Without question, sharing personal images on social networks has become an increasingly popular form of communicating online. Increasingly, emerging digital technologies have enabled users to upload and share third party images without their knowledge or permission. Consequently, people’s images can be misused without their knowledge and can be disseminated online without their consent and with little legal recourse available to protect personal images that are uploaded on social media. While a number of potential problems arise when people share images online, one problem that arises when people share their images on a social network page is that the law is somewhat lagging when it comes to protecting personal images from misuse. The piecemeal approach for legal protection often results with users having a limited ability to seek legal redress. One of the traditional forms of protection has been through the tort of breach of confidence, however there are a number of issues that arise in relation to the way the law of confidence protects people whose images are captured and uploaded on a social network page. This paper will focus on the way that the law of confidence protects personal images that are captured and uploaded online. The paper highlights that the law of confidence provides some protection for people whose images are captured and shared online, however this is limited.