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.

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: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.