When President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle posed for a picture with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, his wife, and their two daughters on Friday, they sparked questions about whether world leaders and their families have the ability to control their online privacy in the digital age.
Spanish law prohibits the media from publishing photos of the Prime Minister’s two daughters. But the media quickly published the photo taken during the reception at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. This ignited an online frenzy of derogatory comments about the teenage girls’ appearance. At the request of the Spanish government, the picture was removed from the popular photo-sharing site Flickr, but the picture had already spread across the Internet on various unmonitored blogs and picture sites.
Print and online media have respected the privacy of various political officials and their families over the years. But the unwanted dissemination of private photos on the Internet has become an increasingly important issue for high-ranking political officials and their families as well as for the average person.
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