Facebook Complains About German Sites Changing Functionality Of 'Like' Button To Comply With Law
from the who's-more-powerful? dept
Who's more powerful when it comes to determining how social voting functionality works in Germany? The government or Facebook? You may recall a few weeks ago there were reports of a German official effectively banning the Facebook "like" button on third party sites as a privacy violation. While it doesn't say it's officially in response to this, the German news site Heise implemented a neat little workaround, in which you have to first click on the icon to "activate" it, and then you can click the "like" (Google translation of the original German). Under this system, the "like" button isn't loaded until a user clicks on it, thus there's no issue of Facebook automatically tracking folks via the button.It probably generates a lot less usage, but as a kludgey workaround, it's fairly clever. Apparently the setup attracted lots of interest, with hundreds of other sites contacting Heise to find out how they did it. The fact that users who are actually worried could just block Facebook from loading on third party sites doesn't seem to occur to anyone. But here's where the story gets odd. According to Slashdot, where we first spotted this story, Facebook is upset about this (Google translation from the original German). While there appears to be some confusion, Facebook may have initially threatened to block Heise's usage, but later said it was okay, but "not ideal."
Of course, given the statements by the German officials saying that the regular button violated privacy laws, shouldn't Facebook be happy that some users have been figuring out workarounds to let the button continue working? It seems like a bad strategic move to complain about the company who may have figured out a way to keep the "like" button on many sites that might have otherwise removed it.
Filed Under: germany, like button, privacy
Companies: facebook
