
Germany orders changes to Facebook real name policy  - denzil_correa
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20766682
======
draq
Those who reads German may be interested in reading the official press release
([https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/presse/20121217-facebook-k...](https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/presse/20121217-facebook-
klarnamen.htm)), including the decrees to Facebook Inc./USA and Facebook
Ltd./Ireland.

Non-professional summary and translation:

I. Facebook is obligated by law to provide the following for the natural
persons who want to use www.facebook.com in Schleswig-Holstein:

1\. It must be possible to register with a pseudonym.

2\. Accounts of registered users whose registration is blocked because of
incomplete disclosure or non-disclosure of their real information must be
reactivated.

3\. Users are to be informed on www.facebook.com about the possibility to
register with a pseudonym before the registration.

II. The immediate execution of the provision I. N°2 is decreed.

III. If Facebook does not implement the provisions of I. within two weeks
after the delivery of this notice, it will be handed out a penalty of 20,000
EUR.

------
marknutter
This is ridiculous. If you don't like services that require your full name,
don't use them. It's clear people like those services. The biggest appeal of
Facebook is that you can connect with people from your past by typing their
names into search or being connected to them through your current FB friends.
If half the people on FB have pseudonyms it will make the process of
reconnecting with old friends and family frustrating to the point of
uselessness.

~~~
joelthelion
>If you don't like services that require your full name, don't use them

Except Facebook has a monopoly, minors are using it, and so on. Face it, in
Europe we have a different understanding of the role of the State and if you
want to do business in here, you'll have to abide by our rules.

~~~
mseebach
> Except Facebook has a monopoly

No they don't, _especially_ not in Germany.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StudiVZ>

~~~
darklajid
Really? Seriously?

"StudiVZ" was a lame (and, if I remember correctly, bit-by-bit when they
started) clone of FB, which won here for a while. Probably because they
actually had a local interface and added local universities, schools and
whatnot. Since then FB expanded to Germany, StudiVZ is for all purposes dead
and obsolete.

I don't even know how you come up with that example. It's like pointing to
Myspace or whatever came before that.

~~~
mseebach
Both StudiVZ and MySpace are examples of how Facebook isn't a monopoly. So is
Twitter and e-mail and Google Plus. And PHPBB and Diaspora.

Facebook has a monopoly on being Facebook. For everything else, there's ample
competition. The fact that Facebook is more popular than the competition
doesn't make it a monopoly.

~~~
darklajid
I had the same argument over here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4938204>

Would you consider Windows as a monopoly? There are alternatives.. If your
answer is 'No', the EU seems to disagree with you (and might on the FB case,
we'll see). If your answer is 'Yes', where's the difference?

~~~
mseebach
Windows is more of a monopoly in the sense that there is much heavier lock-in:
It's not trivial to write an application in such a way that it works equally
well under Windows and the alternatives. The lock-in to Facebook is much, much
lighter.

But more importantly, being a monopoly (however such is defined) is not in
itself illegal, and it's not a carte blanche for publicity-hungry politicians
to hand-wavily demand to control random details of a company's operations.

What is illegal is monopolistic behaviour, to leverage your dominance in one
market to unfairly gain an advantage in another. That is what Microsoft did
and was punished for (rather than merely being a monopoly), and what Google
might be getting in trouble for.

~~~
adimitrov
> The lock-in to Facebook is much, much lighter.

WHAT? Pardon, but I don't see _at all_ how you could come to such a
conclusion. The primary assets of Windows are: ease-of-use, ubiquity, hardware
compatibility. But if you have an application you love that works on Windows,
chances are (if it's not a game, but even then there are _other_ games and
entertainment software) that there is a port or clone for another system (like
Linux or Mac OS X — I'm speaking consumer-grade stuff here, business is
another matter entirely.)

 _Facebook_ on the other hand has these assets: your Mom's on Facebook, your
dad's on Facebook, so is your neighbour, your aunt, all your friends,
(ex-)class mates, acquaintances, that boy or girl you had a crush on in first
grade…

Your social graph is _much_ more difficult to migrate to a different social
platform than it is to port an application from one OS to another (or to find
it on the Net.) Because it is pretty much impossible. Mass-migrations sort-of
happen (like StudiVZ → Facebook a while back in Germany, or Digg → reddit, but
there the social cohesion was rather low,) but only in high pressure
situations. You can't easily bring about such a situation without the point of
origin of said migration fucking up in a major way.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr — they're all sitting on social gold, and
they're keeping it for now.

~~~
mseebach
Easy on the drama, please.

Monopoly means that there is only a single seller of a given commodity.

Windows _was_ a monopoly in the 1990s and until I guess around when OS X came
out - these alternative applications you mention didn't exist yet. Today I
wouldn't say Windows is a monopoly, partly because good-enough alternative
applications exists, partly because many (most) new, fancy applications are
web-based and not limited to IE (as they once were). Today, really, there is
really only one reason to run Windows, and it's Office - and that's going away
fast, especially as users dawn on the fact that they can communicate without
e-mailing Word documents around.

Another important component of Windows monopoly is exclusivity. Today I can
trivially run Windows in a VM for that fraction of my workflow that isn't
properly supported on Mac or Linux - 10 years ago, the best you could do was
dual booting, which was painful and tricky for non-technical users.

Which brings me to Facebook: No, you can't port your social network lock,
stock and barrel to a competing service. But you can trivially, with very
little friction, maintain your presence on multiple networks - all you need is
another tab in your browser, or a client app that supports each. You can even
use the APIs of the respective services to integrate them with each other -
you can automatically post Tweets to Facebook and vise versa. Plenty of people
I know use both Facebook and Twitter in parallel with various degrees of
automated integration. That's not the face of a monopoly.

The fact that other people don't want to stop using Facebook does not make
Facebook a monopoly. They have strong network effects, yes, but that's not the
same.

------
Hopka
It's interesting because there are several German social networks (XING,
StudiVZ, wer-kennt-wen, ...) that also do not allow their users to use
pseudonyms. As far as I know, none of them have been ordered to change their
policies.

~~~
sdoering
Yepp. As good, as one might find this move from the German regulators, one
must wonder, why only one network is targeted. But that is nothing new here in
Germany. Most often it is one symbolic network (often times Google), that is
the target. So one might suspect, that this is nothing more than symbolic
policy.

The data-protecting people in our government are toothless kittens, they have
no real influence and these moves seem to me only to be made, to show, that
they are still there and to justify their existence.

Sad to see, but there does not seem to be any real chance, that this will
change.

~~~
drucken
So, this "decree" has no meaning even if fought in a German legal court?

~~~
rmc
Depends. Some countries empower the local data protection commission to make
binding injunctions forcing a company/person to do/not do a thing. I know
Ireland has this. No idea of Germany, but presume it's similar.

~~~
sdoering
They might force FB to do this. But having seen what happens here with Google
or all the other cases, I really doubt their "power" or will to do much more,
than symbolic policy.

~~~
rmc
You know the Irish Data Protection Commissioner force Facebook to make some
privacy related changes, right?

------
wheels
For the folks questioning jurisdiction, that's moot on several counts, most
notably since Facebook has had a German daughter company ("Facebook Germany
GmbH") since 2009.

~~~
marknutter
So suppose Facebook dissolves that daughter company. What then?

------
sovok
Maybe not that big of a deal. If Facebook doesn't comply, they only have to
pay 20000€: [http://translate.google.de/translate?twu=1?sl=de&tl=en&#...</a>

~~~
Xylakant
Maybe more of a deal is that this is the first step in the legal battle. Now
Facebook can appeal or ignore but that opens up to get a court injunction all
the way up to the european courts until you get a decision on the highest
level. Without a first injunction, none of that would be possible.

------
draq
The change in policy is demanded by the "Independent State Centre for Data
Protection, Schleswig-Holstein", a public institution of a constituent state,
but not a court of law.

It will probably go through all the court instances, before a conclusion is
reached. So let's talk about it next year.

~~~
jeltz
I am pretty sure it might take more than one year since this should end up in
the European Court.

~~~
rmc
_this should end up in the European Court_

Eh? I'm not sure such a thing called "the European Court" exists...

~~~
jeltz
Yes, it does and is more formally called the European Court of Justice.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Court_of_Justice>

It only handles union law and not national law but I bet FB will try to get
the ECJ to review the case as a free movement of goods issue.

~~~
rmc
Unlikely. Considering how the new Data Protection Directive being written goes
further than the current one, and seems to be targetting various things
Facebook does (like having all it's EU stuff in Ireland). It seems like a lot
of EU law is on the side of privacy and data protection.

~~~
jeltz
I am pretty sure Facebook will try to appeal. Does not mean they will get the
appeal though.

------
darklajid
Interesting.

That _might_ (if enforced and extended) make G+ useable for me again. I
understand that the controversy around the decision, but I've to admit that
I'm very happy about this move.

~~~
summerdown2
Me too. I'm a big fan of pseudonyms, and G+'s real name policy is the only
reason I'm not using it.

------
gambiting
Comments like this: "It is unacceptable that a US portal like Facebook
violates German data protection law unopposed and with no prospect of an end"

Make me realize that there are still people who do not understand how the
Internet works. There are no boarders on the Internet. German people are under
no obligation whatsoever to use "a US portal".

~~~
junto
Facebook operates in Germany, therefore it is bound by the regulations of that
country. In the same manner that it would break German law if it openly
promoted antisemitism.

Facebook can chose not to operate and offer services to German customers
within Germany if it doesn't like the laws of that country.

Every country has the right to define its own laws that (in general) are there
to protect its citizens. Companies who operate in a country are bound by those
laws, whether they like them or not.

Privacy is very important to Germans. They have learnt from experience that it
is very dangerous to centralize identifying information within the hands of a
single ruling entity.

~~~
lotu
Does Facebook actually have offices in Germany? If not does Germany really
have jurisdiction.

~~~
X-Istence
As far as I am aware they operate out of Ireland, that means they need to
follow EU laws.

I am not aware if that gives Germany any power over them or not, but if
Germany can prove that the same laws they are referencing (and the data
protection laws are the same across the EU, so I am making a big assumption
here that it is the case) they could make Facebook follow the EU laws.

~~~
rmc
_I am not aware if that gives Germany any power over them or not_

Not really, it is Irish law that applies.

 _the data protection laws are the same across the EU, so I am making a big
assumption here that it is the case_

Yes and no. EU Directives set out a lot details (and usually minimum levels)
for various things, but countries implement & transpose them into national law
(i.e. actual law) themselves and there can be differences. Remember not all
countries in EU speak same language, have same legal systems (civil law vs.
common law) or use the same currency so there will be some some superficial
differences. Sometimes countries get a opt-out of certain EU directives.
Sometimes countries will go above and beyond the EU directives. (e.g. in UK
it's possible to opt out of the 48 hr maximum working week, whereas France has
no opt out and sets the maximum working week at 35 hrs.) Broadly speaking EU
law will be the same across the EU.

However the next EU Data Protection / Privacy directive will allow one country
to act against a company/person if they are active in that country, rather
than it having to be based on where that company's headquarters are.

------
jamestc
Luckily the thing that all websites are missing when they ask you to fill in a
name field is the ability to verify whether or not it is actually your name.

------
feint
Shouldn't Facebook be allowed to do what it likes? Regulating how an internet
company chooses to run its product is very worrying.

~~~
mhurron
If you operate in a country you still have to follow that countries laws.
Being an 'internet company' doesn't change that.

Now for this specific case, whether Facebook has offices in Germany or if they
sell to Germans, I don't know but if any of those are true they may have to
abide by by these laws.

Also, no, no company should be allowed to do what it likes.

~~~
hdra
I have been curious about these things for a while. When is an internet
company considered breaking the law, if all they do is put their product
online and make it accessible on the internet (i.e. from everywhere)?

Say, a web app X that shows a collections of cat pictures uploaded by the
users, and country Y where cat pictures are banned in every media. How does
this work?

~~~
hnandy
I can't answer your question completely and I'm by no means a legal expert,
but I know that German law states that you have to abide by German laws if you
website is targeting visitors/customers living in Germany, even if you aren't
German yourself.

Short example: An American hosting a personal WW2 website in the US with a
huge German user-base has a good chance of getting in trouble in Germany if he
denies the existence of the holocaust on it.

It took quite a while to dig up some facts about this topic, but take a look
at [http://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-
bin/rechtsprechung/doc...](http://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-
bin/rechtsprechung/document.py?Gericht=bgh&Art=pm&Datum=2010&Sort=3&nr=51134&pos=0&anz=48&Blank=1)
(in German, but can be translated with Google translate). According to that
article our BGH thinks that the New York Times has to take down defamatory
statements about a German/Spanish resident that went to court in Germany if
they don't want to break German law. Further down they even add the fact that
the NYT had ~15,000 registered German users back then to solidify the claim
that the NYT is targeted at a German audience. IMO this shows that some
connection to German residents has to exist for German law to be concerned.
From what I know, a German telephone number or offering a German translation
of a website might suffice for this connection to be made, too.

On another note: I have not found any case where an extradition to Germany
took place, but I have heard of non-internet-cases where people got into
trouble when they traveled to Germany.

