West Midlands Police seem to take privacy very seriously. So when three 20-year-old men were arrested on suspicion of sheep theft, police added pixels to the victims' faces - yes to the lambs - to display in their press release.
According to the statement, the Romanians took the lambs in a car in the Yardley of the West Midlands, and the police managed to capture them.
BBC News commented:
"Sources say that the officer blurred the image as a joke. He apparently concluded that he had an obligation under the Convention on the Rights of the Sheep in Europe to hide the faces of lambs. "
And a more serious note
West Midlands Police acted entirely under guidelines which specifically state that they should not give information related to victims of some criminal activity. Under legislation including the Data Protection Act and section 8 of the Human Rights Act, the police must protect any personal information, except and if there is a very serious reason.
But it is not just the police, which has to protect personal information. Journalists, for example, are subject to the same law.
Again the police movement was exaggerated.
In a recent example, however, Huffington Post reported that David Dinsmore, Chief Operating Officer of News UK, was convicted of publishing information identifying the victim of a sexual assault.
One of the group's newspapers had published the photograph of the former England player Adam Johnson. The court ruled that it did not go far enough to cover up the identity of the victim.
From error of a newspaper, which does not sufficiently conceal the identity of the victim, a lot can happen. Somewhere here we should also mention the dangers of social media, where the public tries to guess the victim by gathering clues.
In today's on-line world where information lives forever, there is no room for privacy mistakes.
