The use of WhatsApp without the declaration of consent from every person in the user’s address book directory is deemed to be inadmissible in a recent decision by the family law department of a German lower federal court (AG Bad Hersfeld, 15.05.2017 – F 120/17 EASO).
The court held that the mother of an 11-year-old boy had to ensure and constantly control that all of her son’s phone contacts had given their consent to the transfer of their contact data to WhatsApp.
Human interactions with technology
In the past few years, the use of social media has increased rapidly. A key feature of social media platforms and social media apps is the ability to interact with other people in ways that were not thought possible in previous generations. With the click of a button, someone from the other side of the world can appear on a screen in front of you.
Technology and social media have not just given rise to platforms that facilitate human-to-human interaction: recently, advancements in technology have led to a rise in a new type of social relationship: human-to-computer interaction. The interactions we have with technology are not just based on user input. Technology has learned to respond to people. It can communicate with us. It can perform tasks. It can learn our habits and tailor services to our needs. It can learn to identify us. It can assemble information and provide solutions to problems. This ‘artificial intelligence’ (or AI) has become a key component in our daily social interactions.
The South African Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPI), which protects the processing of personal information by public and private bodies, is much like similar UK and EU legislation. It was signed into law in November 2013 but is not in full effect yet. Once the Act is made effective, companies will be given a year’s grace to comply with the Act, unless this period is extended as allowed by the Act.
With the proliferation of so-called “fake news”, companies are starting to rely on third party organizations to perform a “fact checking” function in order to distinguish between legitimate news and fake news. The fake news epidemic gained traction in the recent US presidential election. We have previously written about the fake news problem, as well as the UK Government’s plan to tackle the issue.
While fake news began as false information disguised as legitimate news sources, the problem with fake news and the question as to what constitutes fake news is becoming more complicated and nuanced.
Social media users have a new demand for 2017 – they want the ability to edit their public messages. Spelling mistakes, missing words and misplaced pronouns can have embarrassing, unintended and sometimes dangerous consequences. The ability to edit one’s message is an attractive feature. This request has led some users on the social media platform Twitter to ask its CEO when an edit function would be introduced.
The Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Hamburg DPA) recently issued an administrative order prohibiting Facebook from collecting and storing user data of German WhatsApp users.
The Hamburg DPA also ordered Facebook to also delete all data that has already been forwarded to Facebook by WhatsApp.
How safe is information is hidden behind an individual’s privacy settings? Can I assume that my interest in privacy ensures that anything marked “private,” or “shared only with my friends” remains so, even in the face of a production order in Canada?
Facebook has won an appeal against a Belgian court ruling, which ordered it to stop tracking logged-out users who visit Facebook pages and other websites linked to Facebook.
On 29 June 2016 the Brussels Court of Appeal held that the Belgian data protection authority (the Belgian Privacy Commission), which brought the original case, does not have jurisdiction over Facebook’s operations in Ireland, where the data is actually processed.
Facebook became the latest American technology company to face antitrust hurdles in Europe after the German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt), a competition authority, opened an investigation into whether Facebook Inc., USA, Facebook Ireland Limited and Facebook Germany GmbH abused their alleged dominant position in social networking by violating data protection laws. Accordingly, unlike other proceedings the Cartel Office’s investigation targeting Facebook is for the first time based on the potential invalidity of its terms of use pursuant to German data privacy laws.
The anonymity of the Internet has posed many challenges to the protection of intellectual property rights. The sheer size of the population of online users and the millions of file-sharing programs and other social media outlets that exist have left IP rights holders struggling to protect their property and goodwill in the digital era. For example, the battle between protecting copyright online while simultaneously protecting the privacy rights of online users has led to interesting debates in the courts as well as new IP strategies that are currently being explored.