The Consumer Organization found violations of user privacy and data being collected without prior consent.
There are good news coming from Germany for online privacy advocates. According to Reuters, the German consumer rights group announced this Monday that Facebook's use or private data is illegal. The social media platform breached the rights of it's users because they had not gained rightful and well-informed consent from their users.
The verdict was made by a regional Court in Berlin in a wave of investigations on Big Tech companies and their way or retrieving and analyzing personal data in order to use them for super-targeted marketing campaigns.
The Federation of German Consumer Organisations investigated Facebook's terms of service and has found parts that are not valid for the lawful collection of private information. It is not a surprise, that Facebook deliberately deceives their users and hides privacy related settings in their configuration panel.
One of the main consumer concerns was that the user location tracking is enabled by default on smartphones. In other settings most privacy-related settings were disabled by default to allow default spying on the users online behavior.
Now the 2 Billion user social-media Giant has the right to appeal to the courts against this ruling. We can only speculate how this story unfolds further, but I think that informing users about the collected data in a meaningful way and scrutinizing the mechanisms in which they are being analyzed is a big step forward, in the efforts to ensure a more private and safe environment in the online space.
