Schleswig-Holstein puts Facebook on the index
In Germany, data protection advocates want to protect German users from Facebook. The Independent State Center for Data Protection in Schleswig-Holstein (ULD) has advised all website operators in the state to delete their Facebook fan pages and remove social plugins and the «Like» button from their homepages.
The reason for this lies with an operator in the USA. Personal and personalized data was sent to the operator in the USA when using Facebook - without informing the user, as Horizont.net wrote on Friday. This violates German and European data protection law.
According to Horizont.net, ULD has made use of the Telemedia Act TMG, the Federal Data Protection Act BDSG and the State Data Protection Act Schleswig-Holstein LDSG SH. If website operators do not stop transferring data about their users to Facebook in the USA by the end of September, ULD reserves the right to take further measures. Violations could result in fines of up to 50,000 euros.
According to Horizont.net, ULD head Thilo Weichert believes that the time is more than ripe for a Facebook ban. ULD has been informally pointing out for some time that many Facebook services are illegal. However, this has so far prevented few operators from using the services. This is because they are easy to install and can be used free of charge. Such offers are primarily the reach analysis that is meaningful for advertising purposes. Payment is made with the user's data. Facebook has now achieved an estimated market value of over 50 billion dollars worldwide with the help of this data.
As Cologne-based media lawyer Christian Solmecke suspects, an absolute ban on Facebook activities is not the only feasible way to protect users from data theft and keep them on legally safe ground, Horizont.net continues. The only possible integration currently looks like the "Like" button is initially integrated as a pure image on a website without any functionality. The actual "Like" button should only be loaded with its full functionality after clicking on this image. In this way, user data would not be transferred to Facebook per se.
