The Sun published a story about the man, who had been convicted of possessing and distributing child pornography. It told of how the man had made a delivery on behalf of the supermarket to a nursery school's kitchen.
The man's mother complained to the PCC, which said that the paper was entitled to research and publish the story but that the video material was intrusive and broke its rules on subterfuge.
Its ruling said that it is hard "to justify the taking and use of the audiovisual footage of the complainant’s son at work in the supermarket, given that the public interest element of the story related only to the delivery to the nursery."
"The Commission has always said that there must be a powerful public interest justification for the use of undercover filming. On this occasion, there was no dispute that he worked for the supermarket, and the footage was not necessary to prove it. There was therefore insufficient justification for the subterfuge, and the result was a breach of … the Code," it said.
The ruling underlined that the publication of the story and the photograph of the man making it were legitimate.
"The Commission concluded that there was a considerable public interest justification for the story as a whole … the newspaper was entitled to highlight, and comment robustly on, this situation," it said.
The newspaper industry is not regulated by Government, but most papers are members of the PCC and submit to its system of self-regulation. It rules on breaches of its Code of Conduct.
The PCC was using the powers it undertook in 2007 to regulate the audio visual content of newspaper websites. It regulates anything that is editorial in nature and published by the newspaper organisation itself. It does not take action on user-submitted content.
