Germany has told Facebook to change the way it gathers data (buzzfeednews.com).
Those in the EU continuing to be annoyingly harsh on the American social networking behemoth with an aim to connect everybody and connect everything they are up to for advertisers, implying that they have abused their “market dominance” verging on virtual monopoly:
The German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said Facebook could continue to collect user data from people who use its own services like Instagram and WhatsApp—but it shouldn’t be able to combine it with a user’s main Facebook account, unless that user gives consent. That data will need to be locked to those specific apps only.
And saying the company would have to change its policy on how it tracks people in a manner not necessitating the sudden flying of pigs.
Currently, Facebook tracks people—even those who don’t have a Facebook account—across the internet by using code and features such [as] getting websites to use its “Like” and “Share” buttons on their pages. It assigns all their activity to a Facebook account if they have one. The FCO ruled that the company could still track people—but can no longer assign this data to their main Facebook account.
The practice enabling the collection of data about its users’ activities on millions of non-Facebook sites and the ruling seemingly imposing actions seemingly similar to the popular Facebook Container add-on for Firefox (addons.mozilla.org) which isolates your Facebook identity making it harder for Facebook to track your visits to other websites. And with the regulator able to impose fines of up to 10% of the company’s annual turnover—roughly $5.5 billion in this case (cnn.com)—if Fidiotbook fails to comply, potentially dwarfing what Google recently had to pay as a European introduced GDPR cookie consent fine (Latest Picks 21st Jan. 2019).
Disagreeing with the decision in a blog post published shortly after the FCO press statement:
“Popularity [of our service] is not dominance,” Facebook wrote, and said that according to its own survey, over 40% of social media users in Germany don’t use Facebook, and that it had enough competition in the country.
And saying that its use of people’s collected data helped them not only make people’s experience better but “protects people’s safety, including identifying abusive behavior, and disabling accounts tied to terrorism, child exploitation, and election interference across both Facebook and Instagram” with only old uncle Tom Cobley’s use of Fidiotbook to trawl for pictures of “friends” he will never meet to “decorate” while wearings stockings to upload to fap tubes and Chapopolis while pretending to be the jizz tributed depicted seemingly the only moral panic not rolled out to defend.
Recent/related stories
- Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock threatens to ban social media over teen’s suicide—and possibly bruised ego he is still baring (Blog 28th January 2019)
- Google hit with £44m GDPR fine over ads (Latest Picks 21st January 2019)
- Facebook emails showing knowledge about flaws in its privacy policy are seized by Parliament’s Serjeant-at-Arms (Blog 25th November 2018)
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