To whom the network "knocks"

Until the end of 2021, German politicians and government agencies need to delete their Facebook pages. This demand was made by the chief data protection officer in Germany, the federal government's commissioner on this issue, Ulrich Kelber, reports Spiegel online. According to the official, the policy of this social network endangers the confidentiality of a huge number of German citizens subscribed to certain departments.

The German federal government alone has 879,000 Facebook fans and a total of 1 million followers. By the way, Chancellor Angela Merkel, like her press secretary Steffen Seibert, does not have her own authorized page on this social network, but almost 49 thousand people have signed up for the head of the CDU Armin Laschet, who may become her successor after the autumn elections to the Bundestag. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has more than 63 thousand subscribers, and Health Minister Jens Spahn has three times more (against the background of the coronavirus pandemic, which has been going on for a year and a half, such an increased interest is not surprising). They actively leave comments under posts, arrange heated discussions, put "likes" and "dislikes". However, now the federal commissioner of the government is demanding from ministers and departments to curtail virtual feedback from citizens.

"Managing Facebook fan pages cannot be implemented in a way that meets privacy requirements … Moderators are not accountable to the European Data Protection Regulation. Given the ongoing violations, I strongly recommend that the pages be disabled by the end of the year," Kelber said in a letter to federal ministries. and agencies. Earlier, the press and information department of the German government tried to discuss privacy concerns with Facebook representatives. However, in response, the company allegedly provided the authorities with only old unsubscriptions of the 2019 sample.

By the way, Mr. Kelber has been at war with social networks and other platforms for several years. Last spring, he warned the German federal authorities against using WhatsApp, which is known to be owned by Facebook. As the newspaper Handelsblatt wrote, he sent a letter to officials, where he called their correspondence through this popular messenger unacceptable, even during a pandemic, when civil servants were forced to switch to telecommuting and cut down on personal communication. Kelber already then claimed that when sending messages, WhatsApp receives metadata every time, which is then transmitted to Facebook. In his opinion, this is fraught with leaks of IP addresses and other information about the smartphone of this or that high-ranking politician, sensitive personal information about him. However, representatives of WhatsApp have officially denied this assumption. However, quite recently, Kelber's regional colleague, Hamburg's commissioner for z% B, made complaints about the messenger because of its new privacy policy.0protect personal data and freedom of information Johannes Kaspar.

Meanwhile

The upper house of the FRG parliament, following the Bundestag, approved a bill on a unified database of foreigners living in the republic. According to Deutsche Welle, the existing registry should become centralized and accessible to a wide variety of departments – from the youth affairs department to the criminal police. Now it will be entered information, including the address of residence and migration status of a person, and "in some cases, we can talk about confidential information, for example, about political and sexual orientation."