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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".
Or, alternatively... In Europe, we actually have pretty strong protections on our privacy, where companies aren't allowed to just grab all the data they can and run with it. Facebook tries to grab all our data and run with it, and unsurprisingly are being found to be outside the law.
Apparently you haven't missed a friend's WEDDING before because they only saw it fit to send invites on Facebook. It's happened to me. Now we can debate all day about how correct it was for them to do that, but event missed just the same. Facebook has become pervasive enough that people assume you are on it and forget to communicate in other ways.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I respect that facebook needs to make money. I would like to see a user-paid option, thus allowing me to participate by spending my money to pay my own way, so that facebook can monetize me directly filter out all ads and protect my private info.
Participation was not optional, in my case, if I wanted to keep my high-paying IT job. Our clients used facebook as the sole method for registration and tracking in mandatory activities.
I objected strenuously on principle and offered several workable alternatives, including asking the organizers to make up a fictitious account for me to use (I didn't want to be the one committing fraud) and was told I was being a "P.I.T.A." about privacy, as the whole point was to use a single, consolidated, low-cost method for tracking/reporting registration, participation, etc.
isn't this argument valid for some other companies as well ???
No, it's not.
It's only valid for companies with deep pockets, which can have money extorted out of them by governments who have basically squelched their technology sector to the point there's no way in hell it could come up with something competitive with the company they are attempting to extort money from.
Don't paint the German government as the bad guy with your populist straw man argument. The German government claims that facebook is abusing it's market position to force people into terms of use that they wouldn't accept otherwise. This is no different than, say a cable or energy company, abusing a dominant market position to drive prices unreasonably high. Basically it's a monopoly situation and should be scrutinized and penalized as such.
In contrast, before exercising some weak attempts at Euro-bashing you should consider that your American megacorps like facebook pay next to nothing in taxes in the US, because they prefer to be headquartered in Ireland. Something that the European Union is also fighting against.
The "laissez faire" capitalism that is so popular in the US, especially among Republicans promotes small government and power to the corporations. It will not protect the rights of ordinary citizens. Be glad that at least in some parts of the world the government still serves the people.
I think you have lost the plot:
Many Germans died in their extremely prolonged but eventually successful struggle to defeat mass surveillance, and somehow they resent the Americans imposing a considerably worse regime on them.
(The dead are presumably revolving at such high speed in their graves that it is causing a disturbance of the psyche).
I think you will find that quite a lot of the world's population feels much the same, and America's view of the world is not widely shared by others. Most of the world believes that government is a process whereby they collaborate to stop this kind of scummy exploitation by corporations, and not the other way round.
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