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Who’s snooping on your relationship status?

ITteamNext time you change your Facebook relationship status, think twice about what your local council might think.

As Tony Bell found, saying he was ‘married’ led to his local council deciding he was no longer entitled to his single person council tax discount – despite the ‘marriage’ being a joke to wind up colleagues.

We’ve warned before that the law is badly lacking when it comes to this kind of snooping and this case highlights why it’s a problem that’s only going to get worse.

If the council had sent someone out to see what was going on, they would have to seek a magistrates approval for surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Yet doing it online appears to fall totally outside these rules.

This weekend we’ll be publishing details of public authorities using private investigators, and it is clear this is not an isolated case.

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Councils, Online privacy, Surveillance
  • Carol

    This is exactly why I removed my relationship status from public view.

  • Guest

    Why do people use Farcebook anyway? it’s already creepy enough without your boss snooping on everything you do on there…

    Proud to be part of a growing number of people NOT being on Farcebook at all!

    • Guest

      I forgot to add that people who use Farcebook shouldn’t care about big brother and their privacy anyway, pot kettle and all that!

      No, I’m being serious here.

  • billybloggs

    I don’t have a Facebork account, nor go anyehere near Twatter

  • Caledfwlch

    Its a bit random they saw this, I reckon someone on his friends list with a grudge must have “informed” on him, because, surely Council Staff don’;t have enough time to be checking every single name on their books on Facebook??? Still, this shows why if you are going to use Facebook, then just like me, you should have every single privacy setting turned on!! I cannot even be found by my email address, anyone searching for my by name, email or mobile number will get no results.

    • Anonymous

      Until the next time Farcebook updates its privacy settings and again and again after that, privacy on Farcebook is an ongoing process, and I’m convinced the only way to win this game is to not play at all

    • k Heath

      Maybe some automated search engine was the cause of it.

  • k Heath

    About time this whole ‘single person discount’ and the various data scams associated with this were exposed.

  • http://twitter.com/_TheGeoff Geoff Robbins

    Erm…people say, publicly, that they are married and then get upset when somebody believes them? The internet is public by default, don’t put anything on it that you wouldn’t be happy writing onto a sandwich board and parading down your local high street with.