The Court of First Instance of Logroño has convicted a man for impersonating a friend on Tinder for unlawful interference with honour, privacy and personal image. He will have to pay damages of 3,000 euro plus interest.
The defendant created an account on this dating app with the name and photographs that he took from the Facebook profile of his former university classmate, and for months he maintained contact with “at least forty people,” according to the sentence, which has already been ratified by the Provincial Court of La Rioja.
The defendant denied, according to the ruling, that such a violation had occurred “because the photographs were available to anyone who wanted them, being public and accessible to at least 859 people” and that he apologised because “it was a joke.”
The judges have considered, however, that “the fact that a person publishes his or her photo on a different social network, in this case Facebook, does not make it public nor does it allow its indiscriminate use for a different, unauthorised use.”
David Maetzu, the lawyer who has defended the injured party, points out that “the fact that someone’s Facebook profile can be accessed does not authorise them to use it and this has had repercussions on my client in terms of anxiety, stress and problems with his partner.”
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