Spain
Telecommunications Services Conglomerate v. Telegram
Decision Date: March 25, 2024
The Central Court of Instruction No. 5 (Spain) ruled that a precautionary measure, previously adopted by the same Court, suspending Telegram's services on Spanish territory should be annulled because it disproportionately affected the privacy rights of its users. Several telecommunications companies filed a criminal complaint against Telegram, claiming that the platform allowed their content to be sent or published without legal authorization, massively violating their intellectual property rights. They also requested an injunction to suspend the use of Telegram for the duration of the criminal proceedings. On 22 March 2024, the Court granted the injunction. As a result of the public debate generated by the decision, the Court reexamined, ex officio, the appropriateness and proportionality of its judgment. On 25 March 2024, the Court lifted the injunction against Telegram, warning that it would violate the right to privacy of thousands of users who had stored information on the platform. The Court also found that the injunction was excessive and disproportionate because it affected many companies, organizations, and individuals who use Telegram to communicate.

Colombia
Case on the right to privacy in divorce proceedings
Decision Date: October 13, 2022
The Constitutional Court of Colombia held that the online publication of a court docket relating to a divorce, which included files with information about the petitioner’s family life, violated her right to privacy. The petitioner was the defendant in a divorce lawsuit before a civil court. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the government established that every judicial notification should be conducted online. The civil court, alleging compliance with this order, published the divorce docket’s judicial files on its website. Although the petitioner requested, through a tutela action (amparo), that the files should not be accessed through a Google search, the documents remained online and publicly available. The Constitutional Court, upon hearing the case on appeal, clarified that the Covid-19 regulations did not oblige tribunals to publish all judicial files—only to conduct notifications virtually. It also held that private information, such as the petitioner’s, was exempted from publication. Thus, it ruled that publishing the court docket violated the right to privacy. The Court ordered the files to be removed from the internet and requested the Judiciary to train its employees in charge of publishing content on their websites.

Brazil
Big Pan Bakery v. Facebook
Decision Date: March 9, 2021
The Brazilian Superior Court of Justice (STJ) ruled that forcing the disclosure of confidential data of social network users who merely shared a fake video would violate the right to privacy. A video posted anonymously on Facebook, which falsely claimed the presence of larvae in a snack sold by a bakery, led to investigations by public health authorities and in financial losses and reputational damage to the bakery. The bakery sued Facebook requesting that the company immediately suspend the dissemination of the video, and disclose the identities of those responsible for its posting, as well as of those who shared it. The lower courts granted the request for the disclosure of user access logs to those who allegedly shared the video, as they found signs of illegal activity involving the dissemination of defamatory information. The STJ, however, emphasized the importance of the right to privacy and dignity within Brazil’s legal framework governing internet usage. It held that it was disproportionate to infringe the privacy rights of those users who merely shared the video, and it would constitute an “indiscriminate breach of confidentiality” if those users’ details were identified and disclosed to the bakery.