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"The Fourth Reich: Facebook's Like button banned in Germany"

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KynloStephen66515:

One typically rambunctious UK tabloid labelled the current German administration as “The Fourth Reich” last week – and a German state is playing its part by banning the Facebook “Like” button from all websites in its jurisdiction.

The Eurozone financial crisis has produced far-reaching recommendations from the Germans and France which will impact upon the entire EU, prompting the always over-the-top Daily Mail to carry a headline hailing the arrival of the Fourth Reich.

One of the characteristics of Hitler’s regime – apart from the millions of executions, of course – was the arbitrary outlawing of run-of-the-mill activities such as reading certain books or listening to a particular type of music.

And while the latest thing to be banned in one part of Germany may not exactly be a 21st century echo of that time, it does appear to be an arbitrary decision to clamp down on something people all across the world might look upon as one small definition of freedom – the ability to “Like” something on Facebook.

As well as encouraging the public at large to avoid Facebook, the state of Schleswig-Holstein has ordered all government offices to remove the Like button from their websites and take down any Facebook fan pages.

Why? Because the overlords there see Facebook’s data-gathering technique as a violation of German and European data privacy laws.

Anyone who doesn’t comply is liable to face a €50,000 fine.

Still, it beats a one-way ticket to hell, eh?

[Main picture via owenwbrown/Flickr Creative Commons]
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One thing I was ammused with, was the significant lack of the "Like" button on the quoted website (No...Share isn't the same thing!)...Irony strikes again!



Source: http://www.joe.ie/tech/tech-news/the-fourth-reich-facebooks-like-button-banned-in-germany-0015139-1

Renegade:
While I may think that the Facebook privacy policies are dirtier than when I spray the toilet with a nice liquid explosive, I'm not sure that they're addressing the problem properly.

I had nothing but contempt for the European governments before, and my opinion has only sunk further into loathing.

I wish I could agree with the whole "4th Reich" thing, but I think they're actually in a long queue, and only likely to make the 666th Reich or something similarly stupid.

Yay for our wonderful governments that really are looking out for our best interests... (Yeah, right... are you high?)

f0dder:
I had nothing but contempt for the European governments before, and my opinion has only sunk further into loathing.-Renegade (August 21, 2011, 12:57 PM)
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Because of this?

Seems like a pretty sensible thing to me, really. Apart from being a lame "so ein ding müssen wir auch haben" thing, the 'like' button functions as a tracing cookie for facebook. And no, you don't have to actually press it in order for the tracing to happen.

Who on earth would 'like' government pages anyway?

And it's sensible enough to ban anything government-related from using facebook for anything. Would you like your government to be reliant on a big datamining P.O.S that has been known for shutting down pages for no good reason?

Eóin:
As I read that I was thinking this is so bizzare, just doesn't make sense, etc etc. Then I got down to the 5th paragraph and realise ah, everything before that was lies and now it's getting onto the truth. Infact the German goverment is just doing it's small part to protect people from highly insideous privacy violations by a large, international company.

Fair play Germany :Thmbsup:

Yay for our wonderful governments that really are looking out for our best interests... (Yeah, right... are you high?)
-Renegade (August 21, 2011, 12:57 PM)
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Maybe, maybe not... But you can be sure as hell that Facebook is looking out only for itself and ordinary folks be damned.

iphigenie:
Germany has some very strict privacy laws - and they have further laws preventing taking information out of the EU in order to bypass the german laws. It is possible that the Facebook button could infringe some of the law.

As I have experienced first hand on an ecommerce website I built for T Online, German businesses and institutions will err on the safe side to make sure they don't infringe the law, and often put rules above and beyond what the law could be interpreted as, just to be safe from ever beeing at risk. Seems to be what happened here, with one of the regions in Germany deciding the like button could land them in trouble and therefore their own state sites won't have it. And in our day and age of CMSes all it takes it one employee putting the button somewhere and suddenly facebook has a profile of people's tax status, domicile etc. just from the URLs and page data of pages on what is a government site.

Whereas this can be considered overkill, wheeling out comparisons to Nazis and Hitler when talking about the Facebook like button is ridiculous and an insult to the victims of the Nazis and World War II. Out of proportion even when compared to the arbitrary laws the nazis made...

Kind of discredits whatever point the author had to make - if you have to bring the Nazis up, I can assume you didnt have much to contribute in the first place.

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