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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".
US Judge: It's totally fine if Facebook is tracking you tighter than we'd let the FBI track Nazis.
German Judge: Stupid Nazi draconian Facebook terms and conditions are an Orwellian situation!
Last I remember, Facebook and oh, wait, every other online activity is a voluntary participation. And I would hope that the German regulator realizes that the definition of extortion is: the demanding payment of money, property or services, while threatening to commit an illegal act if that is not fulfilled.
I would hope that a regulator would be a bit more conservative about extending its domain where it doesn't have the right to.
Please, the east germans were doing mass surveillance before lord admiral zuck was born. Things like FB are old hat to them; though Zuck and co has pretty much perfected it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You do realize...
If your friend didn't bother to contact you personally, and if none of your mutual friends bothered to contact you either, and no one happened to mention the upcoming wedding in your presence...
It may not have been an accidental oversight...
Right?
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.
The issue here is not deep pockets or not, the issue are networking effects that create an defacto monopoly. If you got such an defacto monopoly many people are forced into doing business with you. If people don't like your terms, that can't just switch to your competition, because your competition isn't offering the same network. A company with such a defacto monopoly is not allowed to abuse this monopoly. They are not allowed to use it extend their market share other areas or force terms on users that they wouldn't accept if healthy competetion was present.
Jan
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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The German market is already safe for French beer. Actually, even safer than for German beer because the German position on what constitutes beer is only valid for beers brewed in Germany for the German market. Import beers have been exempt from this regulation for decades.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The problem is the network effect. The value of Facebook provided by Facebook is negligible, but the value of Facebook provided by your friends is significant. It's hard to be the one person in a social group that doesn't use Facebook. That said, I keep hearing how good Facebook is for organising things, so why not encourage your Facebook-using friends to use it to all agree to quit at the same time: if half of your friends don't quit Facebook, then the value of Facebook is suddenly a lot lower.
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You do know that the country of East Germany hasn't existed in 28 years, right - and when the wall came down and they merged it was the freedom loving West Germans who took over, right ? Right ?
If anything, the experience of a large number of their citizens who lived under the KGB and the STASI are a big part of why Germany is so obsessive about privacy rights these days - they've experienced the alternative.
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