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...Germany's privacy laws also cover social-networking sites. Under the Telemedia Act, a website must get a user's permission before passing personal data to a third party for other purposes. The consumer protection ministry says this applies to foreign Internet companies operating in Germany as well. "Facebook may have its headquarters in the U.S., but it has to respect German privacy laws because it is doing business in Germany," says Holger Eichele, a ministry spokesman. "Facebook has up to 7 million users in Germany, it publishes its guidelines in German, and it's clearly operating in the German...
...Germany's data-protection officials have already taken their concerns over Facebook's compliance with privacy laws to the European Union. The authorities insist that Facebook is violating German laws by setting "cookies" on German computers to capture users' data. "Facebook is taking the e-mail addresses of non-users via the contact lists of members without asking the non-users' permission, and they're storing this data in the U.S.," says Johannes Caspar, a data-protection officer in Hamburg, home to the German office of Facebook. "Facebook is able to create profiles of non-users - that's in breach...
...Facebook, the world's biggest social-networking site with more than 400 million users, defends its privacy controls. "The proposed new language in the Privacy Policy does not relate to the wholesale sharing of user data for commercial purposes as the minister fears," the company said in a statement, "but to a very limited proposal to work with some pre-approved partner websites." Facebook's European policy director, Richard Allan, has offered to meet Aigner to discuss the matter, but her spokesman says she still has "serious concerns...
...Facebook's tussle with the German government is music to the ears of its rivals in Germany. The country's biggest social-networking company, VZ-Networks, says it welcomes Aigner's initiative against Facebook. "It's remarkable she chose to voice her complaints by writing a public letter and by threatening to cancel her Facebook account," Clemens Riedl, chief executive of VZ-Networks, tells TIME. "By doing this, she demonstrates that the German government has no legal means to control U.S. Internet companies operating in Germany." As if acknowledging this itself, the ministry pointed out last week that rival German...
...there's an uneasy truce between the two sides. Aigner has set up a group on Facebook to discuss the data-protection issue - and 5,000 members have signed up to date. She has also doubled the number of friends on her personal profile, according to her spokesman. It seems the minister can't kick the Facebook habit just...