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Germany Takes Legal Steps Against Facebook
crimeandpunishment writes "Not only are Germany and Facebook not friends, they might end up opponents in a courtroom. Germany has begun legal action over privacy. A German data protection official accuses Facebook of illegally saving personal data of people who don't use the site and haven't given permission to access their private information. Germany, which has also launched an investigation into Google over its Street View mapping program, has some of the strictest privacy laws in the world."
"Kohannes Caspar said his Hamburg data protection office had initiated legal steps that could result in Facebook being fined tens of thousands of euros for saving private information of individuals who don't use the site and haven't granted it access to their details."
I bet this is less than their monthly coffee expenses.
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and the Chaos Computer Club - and now also the Pirate Party.
and a constitutional court rejecting data-storage laws.
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if you are not paranoid these days - then you are insane!
Some of the strictest privacy laws in the world, and for a reason. We've had a couple major incidents where ISPs (cough, Telekom) sold customer addresses, phone and mobile numbers to third parties for advertising, for example. I'm glad they're taking this seriously and hope that remark was meant as a praise.
Yeah... and Facebook recently inked a big money deal with Activision-Blizzard, and now the latter has pushed out RealID into WoW, and they just announced that for SC2, and in a few months also for WoW, all forum posts in the official forums are going to have players' real names (first and last name) attached to them. That thread has over 35,000 posts in it already in it from irate WoW players, many of them (including myself) have already cancelled their accounts.
Oh, but Blizzard's own forum moderators won't have THEIR names revealed, because they "cannot risk having their personal lives compromised by in-game issues". But they have no problem selling out their own customers.
Its been a long time since I saw such a dickwad move by an MMO company. This rivals Star Wars Galaxies NGE in terms of betrayal of the player-base by Blizzard.
strikes again
When you think how eager the German government is to collect, filter, file and dissect data passing through the internet pipes, the whole deal feels a bit hollow and like a publicity stunt more than actual concern of their citizens private information. I'd prefer Google and Facebook doing it. I can still NOT give them my data if I so please. It's a bit harder with a Government that badgers ISPs to install sniffing bridges for something not much different from a (warrantless) wire tapping.
Or they just want to eliminate any competition in the field of selling German people's private data, dunno...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I find it funny: This is the a case of the data protection office of Hamburg, a city/federal state in Germany, not Germany. If a city in the US is preparing a case, would the title also be "US takes legal steps"?
It really strikes me as odd that such generic information as for example Facebook and Twitter are storing is kept by private companies. I mean, imagine that e-mail had been invented by Twitter, then all e-mail addresses would have been ending in "@twitter.com" and we would all rely on a private company that would have had insight into all our communications. How long would it have taken us to conclude that such a situation is absurd? Five years? Ten years? Forever?
Of course, someone should be running the servers, but a federated approach would be much better.
Although probably nobody at the upper layers of the German government realizes this, these legal steps of Germany at least raise attention on the importance of privacy.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Germany should take SWIFT to court over the handing over of banking data. I know you think that this is old history, but it isn't. TODAY the EU Parliament will vote in favour of letting the USA have full access to SWIFT's bank data under the guise of anti-terrorism.
The only safeguard is a 'supervisor' from the EU.
But what the EU Parliament is doing is not legal, they cannot overrule national bank privacy laws, and thus cannot prevent Germany taking SWIFT to court over handing German data over to the US. Likewise in some places it is a criminal offense to hand over that data, and those countries can seek arrest of SWIFT, even if EU says they're fine with it.
Of course the USA rejected calls for Europe to see US bank data, and SWIFT continues to claim it is too big a task to filter their 15 million transactions a day.... right..... only 15 million transactions a day is too big an amount of data to filter...
As bad as it is getting in the rest of the world, is it time to move to Germany??
I lived in Sweden in the 80s. Sweden's privacy laws are a bit like Germany's.
The most important thing they did was to require any computer owner to get a license from the government to store personal data. To get the license, they had to lay out what data and what the reasons were for storing it.
Effectively, the law prohibited all personal data applications (and storage) except those that are permitted. In the USA, everything is permitted except that which is prohibited.
I think they finally backed off enough to allow PC owners to keep an address book for personal use without a license, but it was still very strict.
In reality, I would probably hate it if the US government tried the same law. It is so inept that the waiting time for licenses would be years and would require the aid of expensive lawyers. Still, I admire what Sweden was able to accomplish. The giant corporation that I worked for over there thought long and hard before putting customer data in a database.
The fee is being issued for storing information of people who are not customers of facebook.
This is probably the last we will all hear of this case, because the court applied German law. Facebook is US based, so if taken to court in Germany they'd have to apply US law. As a result of this Facebook can ignore the court's decision and nothing will ever happen. If i was in Facebook's position, i'd just appeal against the initial decision. The appelate court will most likely dismiss the case entirely.
Although probably nobody at the upper layers of the German government realizes this, these legal steps of Germany at least raise attention on the importance of privacy.
Actually the whole thing was started by the German minister of Consumer Protection Ilse Aigner. Her quotes upon quitting her own facebook account do reveal how competent she is...
I guess someone at the court got under severe political pressure
What I find the most fascinating about this, is that Facebook read the address book out of people's iPhone to find new friends for them online. And the collected data is permanently stored. German article: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,697733,00.html I don't know if this is the issue described in TFA as the site seems slashdotted.
If there's one way to cause a backlash, that's it! Crazy idea. I'm sad that the country that produced DubLi would have such a nonsensical idea.
If they continue breaking privacy law, the fine will continue, and increase.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
though I have never used either service. This tells me enough about both companies that I will never use either.
Look, the whole purpose of facebook is to be social. To put yourself out there. There shouldn't be an expectation of privacy. Anyone who thinks there should be is a fucking idiot. Period.
If you don't like it, don't use it.
People bitch and moan about things not being transparent. They want government to be transparent. They want every fucking company decision to be transparent, but then they whine when they have to be.
Stupid fucks.
What do I say about Germany going after Facebook? About time someone did!
IBM used to be all that and then became just another company. Now I can say the same for Microsoft. Nobody cares about Gates or Ballmer anymore, but they LOVE seeing Zuckerberg getting it. Zuckerberg is the new Gates, the new IT sector villain people love to hate.
PseudoQuote: "Unfortunately, the RIAA's Allies were not reasonable enough to turn a blind eye to all the small fish and tried to prosecute each and every copyright infringer, despite being out of proportion. It was a goal to get everyone."
(Can I claim the copyright on Reverse-Godwin, the art of taking threads about Nazis and steering them into MAFIAA discussions?)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The user mindset is also different; instead of asking, "Why can't Facebook interoperate with Myspace?" they instead think, "I have friends who are not Facebook users, I will encourage them to join."
Yup, that's the worst part of the whole "Net 2.0 revolution" : Most of the revolutionary things are proprietary and not intercommunicating.
By chance, that's not the situations everywhere :
- for all the privacy problems for which it has been criticized, Google has still the advantage of being openly in favour of intercommunication, even actively encouraging it by using open standards when possible and opening their APIs.
- Jimmy Whales might have a lot of short-comings, but the ecosystem of wikis is still distributed : wikipedia acts as a central hub. But you go to memory-alpha or wookiepedia depending on if you're a Star Trek or Star Wars fan. And seek lulz on unencyclopedia and encyclopedia dramatica.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
only outlaws will have information. They say they are protecting the public. This is only setting precedence to protect the state further down the road. We are responsible for protecting ourselves. If you want to keep it private, don't be giving out things you should keep to yourself. The old adage: Trust no one
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
satisfactory to Government, that is.