'Epic boobs' woman loses privacy case

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has rejected a complaint from a woman that an article in Loaded magazine titled "Wanted! The Epic Boobs girl!" intruded on her privacy.

The article, published in February 2010, contained a number of photographs of the woman taken from the internet and offered readers a reward of 500 if they could encourage her to do a photo shoot.

The complainant claimed that the photos had been taken from her social-networking account on Bebo without her permission.

However, Loaded magazine argued that the pictures were in fact widely available on the internet - so much so that her photo was the third result on a Google search for the search term 'boobs'.

At the time of the complaint there were 1,760,000 matches that related to her and 203,000 image matches of her as the 'epic boobs' girl.

In a statement, director of the PCC Stephen Abell said: "The Commission had to pay regard to the extent to which the information had already been made available, and also the context in which it had appeared.

"It judged that would not have been proportionate to criticise an editor for republishing this material, bearing in mind how - and how far - it had already spread," he continued.

The PCC did however sympathise with the complainant and questioned the "tastefulness" of the piece seeing as she alleged that she was only 15 at the time the photos were taken.