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Facebook Data Collection Under Fire Again
JohnBert writes "A German privacy protection authority is calling on organizations there to close their Facebook fan pages and remove the social networking site's 'Like' button from their websites, arguing that Facebook harvests data in violation of German and European Union law. The Independent Centre for Privacy Protection (ULD), the privacy protection agency for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, issued a news release on Friday saying Facebook builds a broad, individualized profile for people who view Facebook content on third-party websites. Data is sent back to Facebook's servers in the U.S., which the agency alleges violates the German Telemedia Act, the German Federal Data Protection Act and the Data Protection Act of Schleswig-Holstein. The agency alleges the data is held by Facebook for two years, and wants website owners in the state to remove links to Facebook by the end of next month or possibly face a fine."
I see this story and right above it is "Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook" No thanks.
The agency alleges the data is held by Facebook for two years, and wants website owners in the state to remove links to Facebook by the end of next month or possibly face a fine.
I whole heartedly agree. No controversy seen from here, whatsoever.
"Social networking" (a la FB) is a gross (as in, makes me want to puke) application of technology.
He's right. Get out now, and never go back. This is not the web you wanted. This is the web *they* wanted. Don't go there, or accept you'll be owned, ultimately.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
They meet *industry-accepted* standards.. Sounds safe to me..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I've been running a web proxy at home for awhile now and the more I review the logs, the more I see that the entire WWW is a massive data collection engine. Trying to keep up with blocks is like playing whack-a-mole (albeit similarly satisfying).
I agree with their call to action to have FaceBook links removed, but I'd also add that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
As someone with a libertarian bent, I really wish to agree with you.
But as someone who has spent the last 30+ years living amongst the humans I'm going to have to regretfully inform you that world governments actually DO have to put these kinds of laws into enforcement.
I wish they didn't. I really do.
But the general population is just way to gullible and stupid to leave the internet open.
We need laws like this for the same reason we have other anti-scam laws.
Because the general population is SO STUPID that 80% or so of our upper-middle class and less citizens would be scammed out of everything they own due to freely (but ignorantly) giving it away to places like Facebook. The only reasons anyone ever goes to Facebook anymore is because either they're somehow still ignorant of the fact (Freely admitted by the founder) that Facebook was started for the sole purpose of getting ahold of your private information (and has been that ever since) or you're part of the machine, using Facebook to gather other peoples private information in order to use it against them (marketers, scammers, hackers, thieves).
While I personally I don't need these laws, because I'm pretty good at network security (it happens to be what I do for a living), I'd hate to see what would happen to my company if we didn't filter the hell out of our internet link.
I usually get at least one call per day for a down link ("I can't get on the network!") that turns out to be someone bashing their browser repeatedly against the proxy in an attempt to get to Facebook. When I point out that their network works just fine and they're just trying to access a filtered site they first try to "buddy" me into unblocking it just for them (nobody will know!) and then sometimes resort to bribes. In the end they usually threaten in some way.
Picking on Facebook is easy because what they do is quite visible, yet there are many other services that do the same thing without the user's knowledge. Where is the outcry against them?
Maybe we should be thanking Facebook for being so crass that they are raising awareness.
Germany has strict privacy laws because they have learned from history. For the same reason the percentage of people who highly value privacy among the general populace is higher than most other countries as well.
The thing is, even if we disregard conspiracy theories about how Zuck is a CIA drone the three letter agencies will have access to all the data they ask for anyway, and they can do so even overtly since the PATRIOT act. Not to mention people are entrusting their identities, social and political inclinations/affiliations, multiple pictures of themselves for convenient biometric evaluation and lots of other personal data onto a system that is designed to be easily data-mined - a system we have no idea of knowing how secure it is from your run-of-the-mill blackhat or other country's agents.
Or, coming from the other angle: lets assume Zuck is totally concerned about your privacy and will in fact defend to the death each and every single user's right to it - what will happen when inevitably the leadership changes, who is to guarantee that the new owners of your data will act just as ethical?
If there is one thing history teaches us, it is that power concentrations will in the long run lead to suffering, since due to its very nature it will eventually neutralize any (ethical) authority that aims to assert control over it.
"The spirits I have conjured, I can't escape them anymore!" - (The Sourcerer's Apprentice - Goethe)
Those GIFs at least have some measure of anonymity. With Facebook, the user has willingly shared all information as he cares to give to the ad-selling network: name, friends, where they live, things they like, where they hang-out, when they are usually online, and with the Like button virus, what websites they visit...
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
A government fining websites that -link- to facebook would be a pretty scary step.
I agree. But this story is NOT about linking to websites. I can add a a href= link to facebook and nobody gets tracked. The like buttons are not pure links. If you add a img src link to an image hotlinked at my server or more disturbing, include javascript hosted on my server on your site then we are talking about something completely different. I can not track a simple a href= link to my site. I CAN track hotlinked images and javascript. See the huge difference now?
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
But this is only half of the intellectual conversation on the topic. This position only holds as a moral position if people are informed BEFORE they ever visit a website what information their browser and computer will provide to that site, because by the time you click and see a like button, it's done. You did not get to make an informed choice.
Your position would only solve the moral conundrum if it was instead legally forced for every website to somehow convey their collection levels before ever collected.
Facebook not only doesn't do this, they actively provide disinformation on the subject. As Facebook is not subject to German law in THAT sense, the most consistently just thing the government can do in this case is prevent the websites within their country from participating in a foreign company that will never comply with the law you have written regarding the freedom of self-determination.
If websites warned users before actually being served a webpage that there was a Facebook like button, and that button would lead to a violation of their Constitutional rights as citizens of that government, it might be acceptable.
But even then, you are capitulating within your own rights as citizens for the sake of "private property". Or rather, you are allowing the idea of closed ownership of something to supercede what you believe as a society is inherently true about being human.
FanFictionRecs.net
You are missing something: In Germany you own your personal information. Facebook is not allowed to store or use your personal information without your consent. The facebook "Like" button is not just a link, it's a javascript program that sends personal information to Facebook.
Here in Germany it mostly is, yes. Website operators are not allowed to store any personally identifiable information without the user's prior consent. So strictly speaking even Apache's default log settings violate our data protection and privacy laws. There are very limited exceptions for information that is required to process technical operations (eg. the landline-IP mapping at ISPs required to get on the internet) or to protect systems from attacks (eg. a temporary log of recent visitors' IP addresses to watch for DDOS etc.), but in general regulations are very strict here.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
That is two of The Old Ones years- I think each The Old Ones year corresponds to ~15 billion puny human years.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Your position would only solve the moral conundrum if it was instead legally forced for every website to somehow convey their collection levels before ever collected.
And to get a feel for how this would work, try browsing something like CNN using Lynx. How do you like all those cookie prompts? Now imagine it literally times six: Not just traditional cookies, but disk cached images (used as part of evercookies AKA zombie cookies), Flash storage, HTML5 storage, geolocation data requests, and Javascript. And soon maybe Google's NaCL, AKA ActiveX 2: Fail Harder.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Many warned, but who listened?
Solution is to just use a different browser for Facebook. Facebook on Chrome browser can't tell where you've been on Firefox.
I had to recently face facts, that not using Facebook was bad for my social life. And this is having weekend interests that, for the most part, are far away from the connected world.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
This has nothing to do with links per se. This is about the government making sure that web sites do not break any laws - in that case German privacy laws are breached by placing behavioural tracking links on web sites . It is my educated guess that U.S. authorities do the same (=make sure the laws are followed) in the U.S.A., too.