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."

Comments

Strictest Privacy Laws (TM)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Strictest Privacy Laws (TM)

[Anonymous Coward]

Not being a troll here but I've read discussions between Germans where they say the reason privacy laws are above average were because certain politicians and business people wanted to keep their history about various 'associations' with certain a historical 'organisation' secret. Is their any real basis for that line of thinking?

Re:Strictest Privacy Laws (TM)

[bickerdyke]

for a good measure of it, probably yes.

OTOH, the allies were resonable enough to turn a a large enough blind eye to all the small fish. Prosecuting each and every "nazi" would have been a bit out of proportion, as almost everyone was forced into the military, or the party or some party organization. "Von der Wiege bis zur Bahre". It was a goal to get everyone into those organizations. So if they had try to lock up each party "member", 80% of the population would have ended up in prison.

And the other half of those privacy concerns comes from the exact opposite: The fear of the possibility of having a group singled out again, based on some stored data.

But we were too concerned with beeing afraid of state-run data-mining, that we didn't notice the big companies doing it already. Only over the last few years (GP mentione the Telekom affair) this is swinging back.

Re:Strictest Privacy Laws (TM)

[Jedi Alec]

It's a shot across the bow...in a "comply or else" sense.

You start off with 10k, and in case of non-compliance you make it 100k, and then 1M. At some point someone will figure out the formula and reckon that the next one might actually hurt.

Germany

[pinky99]

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"?

good!

[StripedCow]

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.

Re:good!

[TheRaven64]

Maybe you should look a bit more at the history of email. That's exactly the same situation that we had up until the early '90s. There were lots of bulletin board systems (BBSs) and online service providers (OSPs) that you could dial into with a modem. You'd send emails to other users of the same service by uploading it to their servers and having someone else dial in and collect it later. Very few of these were federated, so you'd have a lot of different email addresses. A few BBSs used something like UUCP for dialing in to each other and forwarding emails, but it was by no means universal.

Then people started connecting to the Internet, and a lot of OSPs (e.g. AOL and Compuserve) tried to become ISPs as well, maintaining their walled garden and also giving access to the Internet. To make things more attractive to their customers, they allowed their internal email addresses to function as Internet email addresses too. You could use 12345 to send a Compuserve email to CompuServe user 12345, but 12345@compuserve.com also worked as an Internet email address.

Over time, people stopped bothering with the purely internal email addresses. We've seen this happen with postal mail, with telephones, with email, and with IM, but now people once again buying in to the walled garden approach for social networking. There's a saying or something about people not studying history...

Re:the War on Privacy continues..

[prionic6]

I don't understand the reasoning here... If you pirate it, you can't post on the Blizzard forums anyway. If you buy the game, you can, but only with your real name. So just don't use their forum system...

Re:From TFA

[TheRaven64]

they do nothing to protect the privacy of the individual from the government

Really? In the UK, at least, the government is bound by the data protection act and government departments must disclose, for a small nominal fee, any information that they hold on you. They can also be required to delete it in some circumstances. Given that this act is an implementation of European legislation, I'd be surprised if this isn't the case in most of the EU.

Re:From TFA

[zoney_ie]

Going to be a lot if it is for each (individual) infringement. I imagine Facebook saves the email address, name, and sets up some kind of invisible profile with "guessed" friends etc. for each non-member that someone on facebook sends a join request to. That's a lot of people. Also it may even apply to those who later joined (a *LOT* more people).

I am not on facebook and regularly get their creepy emails that say "Hello 'Real Name', 'A Friend' wants you to join" and "You may know these people on Facebook: ".

It cannot come soon enough if they are prosecuted in Germany and I am reasonably sure what they are doing is illegal in other European countries, if not further afield also.

Re:From TFA

[Hognoxious]

They can also be required to delete it in some circumstances.

Unless they're the police.

Re:From TFA

[drinkypoo]

At least according to our history textbooks, the increasing poverty after the great depression, the very failure of corporations, was a big factor in the rise of fascism. Lots of poor people willing to support anyone for empty promises.

I view it somewhat differently. The failure was dependence on the corporatism model. When a corporation breaks up the assets are divided between the creditors. When a co-op breaks up the assets are divided between the employees. Working for a corporation is a poor way to plan for your future.

Look at how Saddam or AlQuaida buy the support of the local population by building a few schools and hospitals. If you have the chance to get your kids pneumonia treated in a hospital, you probably wouldn't care much about civil liberties.

Just another reason why national health is important, of course. People who will go to work for BP because they're trying to support their family with medical care and whatnot.

Re:Only if they stop

[ivucica]

I'll blow my mod points for this: Facebook is permitted not to pay, but Germany is also permitted to ... let's say it like this, not expose its citizens to dangers of Facebook. If they broke the law in Germany, their services can be expelled from Germany, with easiest thing already disconnecting millions of users in Germany from Facebook: "Hey, mr. DNS Person from the ISP, please point www.facebook.com to this IP... kthxbye"