Facebook Break Privacy Laws in Germany

Not all is well for Facebook. The social networking site has upset Germany’s data protection office.

German officials have begun legal proceedings against the popular site after they discovered that the names and e-mails of people who weren’t members of Facebook were being stored.

Johannes Caspar, head of Hamburg's data protection office wrote in a statement on his office’s website. “Although there are also other social networks that have such friend-finding functions, they do not allow the permanent storage of other people’s data.”

Action comes after German citizens had been contacted by Facebook who had acquired their names and email addresses through other Facebook users who had listed them as a contact. Germany’s consumer protection minister, Ilse Aigner, gave up her Facebook account, alleging that the social media site was not doing enough to protect its users’ data.

This isn’t the first time German officials have locked horns with internet giants. Earlier this year Google landed itself in hot water with its Street View project. Google admitted to gathering data sent over unencrypted Wi-Fi connections while setting up its Street View and under German law they were obliged to surrender the data to the Information Commissioner

The German data protection commission has even gone so far as thought of a solution to the data protection problems brought about by social networking. Their idea is that smartphone developers create an app which allows users keep track of the data collected about them.

However According Oliver Huq, editor of MacUp magazine, creating such an app would pose a legal challenge of its own. Any app designed to track personal data would need to access that data itself and continued, “It would only be able to collect data openly available in the Internet. As soon as an app goes into the Internet and searches based on a specific data set, then naturally that data set becomes vulnerable itself.”

Via Cnet