Spanish lawyer Luis Romero has warned that forwarding WhatsApp screenshots, photos or messages from a private chat to other groups without the consent of the person who wrote them can amount to a criminal offence. He raised the warning in a video shared on his social media accounts.
Romero said the practice can constitute what Spanish law calls "revelación de secretos," or revelation of secrets, an offence that can carry a prison sentence of up to five years.
No automatic right to share others' messages
Instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp are now part of everyday communication, both personally and professionally, and it is common for people to share information or vent inside group chats. Romero said this everyday habit carries a legal risk that many people overlook: distributing screenshots without the consent of the people who created them.
He said many users wrongly assume that belonging to a group chat gives them the right to pass on screenshots, photos or other information that belongs only to the person who wrote it. Being present in a chat, he explained, does not mean a person can freely dispose of content that is not theirs. He said the information shared in those messages, photos or videos belongs exclusively to the people who appear in them, and only they can authorise it to be passed on to third parties.
A sentence of up to five years
Romero said forwarding the content of a private conversation to outsiders breaches privacy and can bring serious criminal consequences. He said simply belonging to a WhatsApp group and having access to its messages does not give someone the right to forward them to third parties, because doing so can constitute the offence of revelation of secrets, punishable by up to five years in prison.
He repeated that being in a WhatsApp group and holding onto those messages does not legitimise passing them on to other recipients, and that doing so without prior authorisation can amount to the same offence, with the same maximum penalty.
Worse if you were never in the group
Romero also pointed to a detail he described as crucial: how much the degree of involvement of the person forwarding the material affects the seriousness of the offence. He said the legal picture becomes even more complicated when the person sharing a screenshot was not even part of the original chat.
According to Romero, sharing this kind of material with third parties is already serious for someone who belongs to the WhatsApp group, but the situation is worse when the content has reached someone indirectly. He said it is serious if a person is in the group or chat, but that it becomes even more serious if the person is not in it and the content still reaches them by some means and is then shared further. He said receiving someone else's screenshot and redistributing it again makes the conduct worse, since the person had no original connection to the conversation and still helps spread unauthorised information.
The lawyer's advice
Given how easily screenshots can be taken and shared, Romero said caution should come first in digital communication. He said the essential rule for avoiding the offence of revelation of secrets is not to forward any message, photo or video without the explicit authorisation of the person affected.
He said the confidentiality of private chats must always be respected, and that his warning is meant to raise awareness of the legal limits on sharing other people's information through messaging apps.
