When authorities use publicly available personal information mation posted about her. Facebook is the world’s largest social network, and according to the website www.checkfacebook.com it had more than 750 million active users worldwide in mid-October 2011. The same website showed that the number of active users in Denmark was just under 2.7 million at the time. The Ombudsman stated that information on a person’s Facebook is publicly available if the person has a profile which allows not only his or her Facebook ‘friends’ but all other Facebook users as well to access the information because the profile is set up to be ‘public’. This applies both to information posted by the person him- or herself and to information posted there by others. From private to publicly accessible profiles However, it is not only when a person’s Facebook profile is ‘public’ that his or her information on Facebook may have been made public in the legal sense. If the person has a very large number of Facebook ‘friends’, especially ‘friends’ not known to him or her, the result may be the same – even if the person does not have a ‘public’ profile. Politicians, for instance, may use Facebook in this way. However, it depends on an individual assessment whether people with a very large number of ‘friends’ are in reality making information about themselves public when posting pictures or text on Facebook. This also applies to information posted on their Facebook by one of their ‘friends’. Generally, however, the more accessible the profile and behaviour are, the more likely it is that information will be regarded as having been made public in the legal sense. People who restrict access to their profile cannot always be sure that the information on their Facebook will remain within their circle of ‘friends’. Thus, information about a person may change from being private to being publicly available if he or she has ‘friends’ with public profiles and these ‘friends’ use Facebook in certain ways. If, for instance, a person with a private profile posts information on his or her Facebook and a ‘friend’ with a public profile posts information on the person’s Facebook as part of a dialogue or discussion, information about the person may in certain circumstances be visible to all Facebook users. The information will thus be disseminated to a wider, indefinite circle and in this way become publicly available. In relation to other social media on the Internet, it likewise has to be assumed that an assessment of the individual case is needed in order to determine if information has been made public. In other words, it is necessary to assess, among other things, how easily accessible the information is and how many people are able to access it. 67