Monthly Archives: March 2016

Facebook and the abuse of market power or the German Federal Cartel Office as data protection authority

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The German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) has started preliminary proceedings against Facebook in early March, trying to find out if Facebook was misusing its market power to enforce abusive terms and conditions because of alleged data protection law violations. What sounds just like what antitrust authorities do, may in fact have a huge impact on Facebook and how it is behaving against its users.

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German Regional Court: Consent necessary when implementing the Facebook Like-Button

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On 9th March 2016, the Regional Court of Dusseldorf issued its ruling (pdf, German) in a proceeding between the consumer protection association of North Rhine-Westphalia and the company Fashion ID which concerned data protection issues surrounding the Facebook Like-Button.

The company had the well-known social plugin included on its website and informed website visitors about the plugin in its privacy policy, which was accessible via a link. In the privacy policy, the company informed that personal might be transmitted to Facebook and also provided a link to the privacy policy of Facebook. Below I will briefly discuss some aspects of the judgment. Continue reading →

Open Source Software, License Compliance and the OpenChain Working Group

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So you set up an open source license compliance program in your company. You educate your employees and you make sure you know how they handle open source software. But what about the software, which is supplied to you? Do you know how your supplier handles open source software? Can you trust that they know what they are doing when it comes to open source license compliance? Continue reading →