Monika Balatoni, Minister of State for Public Diplomacy and Relations of the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice announced that the Ministry denounces a social network site for the suspicion of crime of misusing personal data at a press conference in Budapest this Friday.

The Ministry made the complaint because a parent reached out to the institution that they are powerless against the cyberbullying of their daughter with someone posting on the web in the name of their children with her photograph; and when proceedings were initiated the child was threatened on the street.

The family has already filed a complaint for harassment at the police and now the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice takes a role in the case with accusation because of misuse of personal data.

Monika Balatoni said to the Hungarian News Agency that while investigation is complicated because of the social network site Ask.fm is being operated on a foreign server; she nevertheless indicated that she is confident they can accomplish to find the responsible through international ways; as the site causes serious problems in other countries too.

She noted that Ask.fm is a community site where virtually anyone can log in and ask questions anonymously on the page of a member, but doing so are those as well who are abusing others by registering with the data and photographs of other persons and thus humiliate unsuspecting young people; therefore among whom more have committed suicide in other countries.

She spoke on the fact that cyberbullying claims many victims but perpetrators are hard to find; that is why international cooperation is considered very important in similar cases. She drew attention on the fact too that according to the information of the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice, currently nobody in the world verifies content on Ask.fm.
The Minister of State said that cyberbullying will be the subject of a conference to be organized in Budapest during this autumn; where they would like to see among other things that participants are standing for an EU-wide guideline and controlling on data protection. To her words, adopting such legislation could achieve that more effective action may be taken against cyberbullies.

Monika Balatoni insisted that cyberbullying today is “a living and major problem”; not only in the world or in Europe but in Hungary as well. She added that to this end was the programme ‘The Internet Does Not Forget’ launched to see young people being unafraid of the World Wide Web while knowing what kind of information they should not give out  on themselves when using social networking sites.

(Ministry of Public Administration and Justice)