Federal Press Office Pushes to Review Ban on Government Facebook Page

The Federal Government's Facebook page: The Federal Press Office wants to have the ban checked

The Federal Data Protection Commissioner of Germany, Ulrich Kelber, has expressed his desire to ban the Federal Government from operating a Facebook fan page. The reason cited for this is that operators of such pages share responsibility for data protection regulations, and Facebook does not comply with these. The social media giant had made temporary promises of improvements, but the problems still exist, in the opinion of the Federal Commissioner. The Federal Office for Press and Information of the Federal Government has filed a complaint with the Cologne Administrative Court to seek legal clarity on the operation of Facebook pages. It is said that these proceedings could affect every operator of a Facebook page in the EU, not just government agencies, but private companies as well.

According to a spokeswoman for the federal government, the judicial review is necessary to clarify the fundamental factual and legal issues relating to European data protection law. For the German government, the core issue is whether the operator of a Facebook page can be held responsible under data protection law for the data processing carried out by Facebook. They believe that Facebook alone is solely responsible for its data processing under data protection law, and data protection issues need to be clarified with Facebook alone.

The BPA has commissioned an external law firm to carry out the legal clarification, and they argue that the interest in informing the public about the government’s activities outweighs data protection concerns. Until a final judicial clarification is obtained, the Facebook presence of the federal government would remain an important part of its public relations work. It is unclear how long the court proceedings will last, and questions to the European Court of Justice may also arise. Alternatively, if Facebook could slip under the planned EU-US data privacy framework, the procedure could be eliminated.

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