Germany Rejects Facebook’s Real-Name Policy
Germany has taken on the global social media site by ruling that its real-name policy violates German citizens' right to privacy.
The right of Germans to use pseudonyms is enshrined in the country's laws. (W H / CC-BY-ND 2.0)
Germany has taken on the global social media site by ruling that its real-name policy violates German citizens’ right to privacy.
The Guardian reports:
The Hamburg data protection authority said on Tuesday that the site could not force users to give official ID such as a passport or identity card, nor could it unilaterally change their chosen names to their “real” names on the site.
Facebook’s enforcement of its policy, which limits individuals to one account each and requires that those accounts be held under their real name, frequently results in accounts with suspected pseudonyms being locked by the company until the owner can prove their name, or even just the name being changed back by Facebook.
Johannes Caspar, Hamburg’s commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, was quoted by The Guardian as saying: “As in many other complaints against Facebook, this case demonstrates that the network wants to enforce the so-called real names policy with no regard to national legislation.”
He added that the requirement to use a real name violates the rights, enshrined in German law, to use a pseudonym, while requests for digital copies of an official photo ID also contradict the passport and ID card law. In addition, he said that “the unauthorised modification of the pseudonym … blatantly violated the right to informational self-determination and constitutes a deliberate infringement of the Data Protection Act”.
Facebook has repeatedly clashed with European data regulators, arguing that it should only be bound by the decisions of the Irish data protection office, since its EU headquarters are based in that nation. In June, after the Belgian privacy commission took the company to court over user tracking, a Facebook spokesperson said that the privacy commissioner should have worked with them “through a dialogue with us at Facebook Ireland and with our regulator, the Irish data protection commissioner”.
Read more here.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
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