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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.
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.
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...
the last email from facebook I received had following footer " This message was intended for z.yx@xyz.xz. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please click here to unsubscribe. Facebook, Inc. P.O. Box 10005, Palo Alto, CA 94303 " I do not have an account but I can unsubscribe to NOT receive such emails ! where is the choice - there is no choice they just store data from people who never or have not anymore an account with them. sorry they are not to be trusted and any legal action which tries to rectify things is more then appreciated.
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.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/03/02/1254212/German-Data-Retention-Law-Ruled-Unconstitutional?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+(Slashdot)&utm_content=Google+Reader
Yes, it has been stopped, for now. But not by the gouvernment but by the constitutional court. Politics already trying to modify it just enough to be not in violation of the constitution.
more of that story would be available in german.
bickerdyke
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.
not only that, the german registry offices are still allowed to sell your informations and they do. to banks, insurance companies, religious institutions , the gez (gestapo like org. collecting money for tv stations) etc.
It's about other people giving them your data.
As far as I understood from the article, the main thing was about emails taken from previous contact attempts (address books) and used for spamming.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
I don't consider people to be "intelligent", if they don't realize that contributing to the society is necessary, especially if they're the "strong one's". It's not like most people moving to Switzerland to evade German taxes would starve otherwise, if they stayed here. Granted, you might not be able to afford that Mercedes Benz or Porsche, but getting you from A to B is something your Audi accomplishes more than good enough.
Are you a student? Or perhaps early in your business career? In that case, one day you will realise that you yourself are the best judge of how the money you earned is best spent. Why should you surrender over 50% of your income to a faceless state?
Take Switzerland as an example. Similar left/right wing situation as in most other countries. However, people pay less tax, have more responsibilities and choose themselves to pay for services. There is no such thing as poverty and even the most anti social people are supported both financially and, more importantly, in learning how to become self-sufficient.
In most society there usually is a silent agreement between the state and the intelligent/smart/fortunate ones in order to allow the latter to indulge themselves. IMHO "Peitschen" Peer showed arrogant disregard which didn't do Germany any favours. Naive and full of himself.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)