It Will Take More than Just Mock Battles

Up until now, Facebook has kept its corporate agenda under wraps. Now the company has revealed what it really wants: Users will pay for Facebook with their personal data. What can the politicians do to block that? Nothing. That was made abundantly clear by the German parliament.

What Facebook is pulling is kind of nasty. With new terms and conditions for use in place since Friday, the company can now snoop on users with more precision, thereby allowing advertisements to be more personally tailored and directed to individual Facebook users. Especially nasty is the dictatorial method Facebook is using to do this: Anyone signing in to their Facebook account is now automatically agreeing to the new terms and conditions for use.

And these have changed. Where Facebook previously used the familiar personal pronoun “you” in promising you a personal network of friends who shared the same interests you, it now spells out in some detail what they’re really all about. The explanations of their terms for use read a lot like a synopsis of “The Circle,” Dave Eggers’ novel about the terror of transparency. But it offers not only an overview of the potential risks and side effects of such transparency, it’s also a detailed business model that exchanges their services for your personal data. They’re openness about that is a tribute to the achievement of dedicated politicians.

That aside, the German parliament has again demonstrated how completely powerless it is when up against digital big business. Last Wednesday, two days prior to the changes to Facebook’s terms and conditions, parliament held hearings on the subject that included 39 venerable members from the conservative Christian Democratic Union, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Greens and the liberal Left Party.

Only a European Solution Can Get at Facebook

Also in attendance was Lord Richard Allen, one of Facebook’s highest ranking lobbyists. Data privacy according to German law? User consent to the changes proposed? These issues rolled off Allen like water off a duck’s back. When the unholy event was over, CDU representative Mechthild Heil could do nothing but admit that no changes to the terms and conditions had been achieved.

And why should they? Facebook has its European headquarters in Ireland, and with good reason: Ireland’s lax privacy laws. Numerous attempts to insert German requirements into the rules failed in court. If politicians want to get to Facebook, only a European Union solution can help.

The Market Power of the Individual Against the Market Power of Facebook

It’s called the Information Privacy Law and has been a work in progress in Brussels for years. It’s stuck there at present partly because the German government delays its progress whenever and wherever it can. Publicly, the German government says it is interested in passing it, but in actuality it is bowing to pressure from big business and concerns about having a unified European approach. They need to ask their own government about it.

Peter Schaar, once Germany’s federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, now intends to cancel his Facebook membership in protest. That’s the market power of the individual against Facebook’s market power and it has always been that way. However, there are people who because of their studies or their professions — as well as those too young to know what they’re getting into — need access to Facebook. For them, it’s important that the parliamentarians provide something more than just a phony fight with some Facebook manager.