The British Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has decided in favor of the press regarding a newspaper’s report on a civil servant’s tweets.

Ms Sarah Baskerville complained to the Press Complaints Commission that an article headlined “Oh please, stop this twit from Tweeting, someone”, published in the Daily Mail on 13 November 2010, intruded into her privacy in breach of Clause 3 (Privacy) and was misleading in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

The complaint was not upheld.

Baskerville made the argument that, although her Twitter, blog and Flickr accounts were configured as open and available to anyone on the Internet, she held a “reasonable expectation that my messages…would be published only to my followers”.

If she knowingly set an account to be open and available to anyone, and she operated it under her real name, then her expectation of privacy is curious. Hoping that someone does not look at your tweets is not equivalent to restricted access.

As a result of the newspaper’s article, she had taken the decision – reluctantly – to lock her Twitter stream so it could not be viewed by anybody apart from her followers.

The change in access shows that she realized a distinction can be made between the public and a subscriber; but the risk of re-tweets and forwarding by 700 followers still poses a challenge to any expectation of privacy.

The questions in front of the PCC thus boiled down to whether Baskerville could claim her open tweets as private and whether they were an inaccurate representation of her. It is as if she claimed that yelling a comment to 700 people in a public area is private communication and not an accurate representation of her. It seems fairly obvious why they dismissed the complaint.