Facebook Like Button Ruled Illegal In Germany

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Germany has some of the strictest privacy laws in the world, credited to the county’s unfortunate history with the Stasi during the Cold War. Case in point, they’ve been aggressive in their distaste of Google Street View, and now the German government has ruled that the famous “Like” button from Facebook is illegal! Oh no!

Our story harks from the northern most German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is near to Denmark . Government official Thilo Weichert, who is said to run that state’s data protection center, has ruled that the Facebook “Like” button  tracks a user’s activities across multiple websites, and ergo is illegal not only according to German law, but also with respect to the privacy laws of the greater European Union as well.

Facebook has denied these claims, and says that all personal information gathered by the Like button, like IP addresses used by people who ‘like’ items, is deleted after 90 days, which is the industry standard. However, Weichert’s ruling stands, and as a consequence any websites hosted or based in Schlesig-Holstein have until September 30 to remove their Facebook Like buttons. Don’t do that, and you’ll get slapped with a hefty €50,000 ($71,982) fine by the German government.

There’s no news, at this juncture, concerning whether Facebook has any plans to pursue some sort of legal appeal in Germany, or if they’ll swallow their pride on this, but, certainly, they’ll doubtless be pretty concerned about this ruling settling a legal precedent for the rest of Germany and even across the wider Eurozone.

There are an estimated 20.5 million Facebook users in Germany. No word on how many of those folks live in Schleswig-Holstein, though.