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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."
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.
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.