Doofus Of The Day #351

Today's Doofus is from England.

The Press Complaints Commission has rejected a privacy complaint from a woman about an article and pictures of her in Loaded magazine under the headline "Wanted! The epic boobs girl!"

She was said in the article to have the "best breasts on the block". The accompanying pictures of her were taken from the internet and readers were offered a reward of £500 [about US $739] for assistance in encouraging her to pose for the magazine.

The complainant said that the article intruded into her privacy. The somewhat provocative photographs had been uploaded to her page on Bebo in December 2006, but they had since been published on numerous other sites without her permission.

She said the magazine's article, published in February this year, had caused her upset and embarrassment, and that publication was in breach of the privacy clause in the editors' code of practice.

But the PCC decided that the pictures had been given such a wide circulation that it was no longer credible to describe them as private.

Had Loaded taken them from the Bebo site without them having appeared widely on other sites, the commission might well have reached a different decision.

The magazine, in contesting the complaint, explained that it was commenting on pictures that had been given extremely wide circulation on the net and pointed out that the complainant's photograph had featured in the top three of a Google image search on the word "boobs".

The commission did sympathise with the woman, and accepted that the tastefulness of the article was questionable. However, the issue for the PCC was whether the publication of the information was intrusive, and it decided that it was not.

The commission didn't think it possible to censure the magazine for commenting on material that had already had such wide circulation, and which had already been contextualised in the same way (ie, as an exemplar of beautiful breasts) by many others.

There's more at the link.

Lady (?), here's a hint. If you don't want your boobs splashed all over the Internet, not to mention the printed Press . . . don't publish pictures of them for all the world to see!!!

(Oh - and for those who want to see the pictures concerned, they don't show nudity, but they're still not entirely safe for work, so I won't post them in plain sight. Click on the links below for a small selection of them.)

Boobs 1

Boobs 2

Boobs 3

Boobs 4

Boobs 5

Peter