14 DAY TRIAL // The Germans don’t kid around with online privacy. While the numerous privacy fiascos, debacles and whatever else you want to call them, in the US cause nothing more than public outcry and blogger tirades, mishaps are not treated lightly in Europe and especially in Germany. The country’s data protection officials are now taking steps towards legal actions against Facebook after complaints from the public.
The issue that the social networking is accused of is storing data about people that are not themselves Facebook users and offering no means of removing that data. After several complaints, Hamburg’s Data Protection Authority has now launched a formal investigation that may lead to significant fines for the social network.
"We consider the saving of data from third parties, in this context, to be against data privacy laws," Johannes Caspar, the head of the Hamburg agency, said in a statement. He says Facebook stores details about non-users without their permission or knowledge and uses it for its own purposes.
Facebook enables users to import their address books from other sites or services to allow them which of their friends and contacts have a profile on the social network. It also allows users to send those that aren’t on Facebook email invites to join. These address book details are apparently stored by the social network and this is what the data protection officials are concerned about.
The social network has been sent a letter notifying it of the legal actions and has a little over a month to formulate a response. "We are currently reviewing it and will readily respond to it within the given time frame,” Facebook has said so far.
This isn’t the first time the Hamburg data protection office has taken big-name targets. It has been gunning for Google for at least a year, particularly about Street View. It recently criticized Google’s Wi-Fi data collection with its Street View cars which in turn led to the whole personal Wi-Fi data fiasco which Google is still trying to manage.