Germany's Federal Cartel Office Claims Facebook 'Extorts' Personal Data From Users (independent.co.uk)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Germany's Federal Cartel Office is examining whether Facebook essentially takes advantage of its popularity to bully users into agreeing to terms and conditions they might not understand. The details that users provide help generate the targeted ads that make the company so rich. In the eyes of the Cartel Office, Facebook is "extorting" information from its users, said Frederik Wiemer, a lawyer at Heuking Kuhn Lueer Wojtek in Hamburg. "Whoever doesn't agree to the data use, gets locked out of the social network community," he said. "The fear of social isolation is exploited to get access to the complete surfing activities of users." Andreas Mundt, the Cartel Office's president, said last week he's "eager to present first results" of the Facebook investigation this year. Like the EU's Google investigation, he said the Facebook case tackles "central questions ensuring competition in the digital world in the future".

Comments

Re:I'm not understanding the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Lives of Others is a great movie about that:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/

The Germans gleefully spied on each other. The Stasi at one point had over 90,000 employees in just East Germany, and over 2 million informants out of a population of about 16 million. That means that every one out of eight East Germans was spying for the government. Germany loves their mass surveillance.

Re:I am the first in line to hate on Facebook, but

[Sique]

The difference here is the European understanding of "privacy". While in the U.S., there is this "expectation of privacy", which is routinely denied if you are using a publicly accessible website, the European understanding is different. Here, privacy means that you have the right to control which information about you is publicly available and who has a right to make use of it. This was first established in 1983 in the landmark decision of the German Constitutional Court, which established the informational self-determination.

Re:The new German economic model

[dunkelfalke]

Here's an interesting difference between USA and Germany:
When Google or Facebook break the law in Germany and are fined for it - and the fines aren't even that high, maybe a couple of days of the company's profit - Americans are outraged. When VW breaks the law in the USA and gets an enormous fine that amounts to the yearly profit of the company, Germans generally agree that VW had it coming.