Hi Zerina... sounds good but I think we need more info.

Will your corporate account re-produce personal photos posted by staff on their own personal Instagram accounts?

I would put the onus on your staff... so if they are happy for certain posts to be featured on your company account, I'd suggest together you agree on a suitable hashtag and then ask staff to include that tag on their photos - or those they'd be happy to featured... if you get my meaning.

You see this a lot. For example, I tagged this photo #northsomersetlife and it was picked up by the owner of that account. They credit the photographer in the caption.

Do you intend to pull through photos onto your corporate website?

In reply to Steve Bridger:

Hi Steve, thanks for getting back to me. We don't have a # but we did in my last company. We would never tag any names or involve personal accounts of our employees. We opened this account just to promote a culture in our organisation so occasionally we will take a photo of people having Friday drinks, playing ping pong, photos from social events etc. We always say if we are going to post photos on Instagram so no names are ever mentioned, just us showing our culture. Our office in Malta refused to take part because of data protection so i was wondering whether we need to put something in place or is verbal consent simply enough. If we take a photo at our social event and we tell everyone that it will go on Instagram should that be enough?

Many thanks as always!!!!

In reply to Zerina:

Would be interested in the answer to this one also - we want to start posting pictures of staff socials on Facebook, but I know in the past some staff have been unhappy about being posted. Of course, these were removed after, but with the new GDPR laws coming in, do we need explicit consent? Or is attending work socials enough to agree that you may be posted online?

In reply to Natalie:

I don't think attending a work social implies consent to have your photos used on social media - under the new GDPR regs, consent has to be freely and explicitly given with no penalty for not giving it. If the only way to not give consent to have your photos used was to not attend the event ,then I don't think that's freely or explicitly given consent! ;-)
Jackie

In reply to Jacqueline:

That's fair, thank you for your help.

Playing devil's advocate: I used to work in the Marketing department of Cheltenham Racecourse and one of the conditions of entry into the racecourse is that you may have your photo taken and these pictures could go as far as national media. At such an event, it would be impossible for each of the 66,000 attendees a day to explicitly opt in, so how would they get around this?

I am now at a software company of 100 people so not quite to the same extent, but now curious as to how event photography in terms of GDPR would work!

In reply to Natalie:

Yes it would be good to get a specific reply to what actions as the business we should take. For now I only ask for verbal consent to share photos on Instagram but do i need to take this further and create a consent form.

In reply to Natalie:

I think there's quite a difference between a public event, such as a race meeting where people don't have an expectation of privacy and a closed work event, where people do have an expectation of privacy.