A name and a city on a post-it. This is the image that has been broadcast on Snapchat in recent hours, as violence escalates after the death of 17-year-old Nahel, killed by a police officer after refusing to obey. With a comment: “It is the name of the city where the FDP who killed (sic) our brother lives.”
For having spread this message, referring to the coordinates of the police officer in question, a 20-year-old Internet user appeared on June 29. The prosecutor requested a year in prison, with placement under an electronic bracelet.
Posts on TikTok
As Tech&Co has been able to verify, this is far from being an isolated case. On TikTok, photos showing what is presented as the exact name and address of the police officer in question have been viewed thousands of times. Other publications have come to integrate a screenshot of a house (again presented as that of the police) extracted from Google Street View.
Before justice, Internet users who engage in this activity risk a lot. First, at a civil level, with the notion of invasion of privacy and illegal dissemination of personal data, which goes against the GDPR. But it is above all the penal code that Internet users could be exposed to.
In fact, this situation can be similar to doxxing: the disclosure of personal data with the aim of harming an individual. “In this case, the incrimination can be very broad, especially if there is clearly a desire to harm the victim,” analyzes Alexandre Archambault, a lawyer specializing in digital law.
Article “Samuel Patty”
In particular, one article may apply: article 223-1-1 of the penal code, known as the “Samuel Paty article”, adopted after the murder of the teacher, following the publication of personal information about him on Facebook.
“The act of revealing, disseminating or transmitting, by any means, information related to the private, family or professional life of a person that allows them to be identified or located in order to expose or expose their family members to a direct risk of damage to the person or property that the author cannot ignore is punishable by three years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros”, explains the penal code.
With even greater penalties in the case of a person “repository of public authority” or “in charge of a public service mission”: five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros.
As with the videos of the Annecy attack, it is the Pharos platform that is in charge of collecting the reports, to investigate each illegal publication. Then they instruct the authorities to contact the main social networks, sometimes the only ones capable of providing information to identify the Internet user behind the publications.
Source: BFM TV
