Status: 06/28/2021 9:39 p.m.
The Federal Data Protection Commissioner Kelber has asked the government and the authorities to shut down their Facebook pages. User data is not sufficiently protected and Facebook is not ready to make changes.
The Federal Data Protection Commissioner Ulrich Kelber has asked the federal government and the highest federal authorities to shut down their Facebook pages by the end of the year. A data protection-compliant operation of a “Facebook fan page” is not possible, wrote Kelber in a letter to all federal ministries and the highest federal authorities. Only new concessions from Facebook could enable continued operation.
Government expresses concern
The privacy advocate had already advocated the closure of the Facebook pages in a circular to the same mailing list in May. The Federal Government’s Press and Information Office then spoke to Facebook about the authority’s data protection concerns.
Kelber now wrote that Facebook unfortunately only sent the publicly known “Addendum” from October 2019 to the press office. This agreement, the “Page Controller Addendum”, provides that the site operator and Facebook share responsibility for the sites. All relevant obligations for the requested data protection are therefore with Facebook.
“Facebook doesn’t want to change anything”
However, Kelber considers the “addendum” to be insufficient to meet the data protection regulations. “From my point of view, this shows that Facebook is not prepared to make any changes to its data processing,” wrote Kelber.
The departments and their business areas that operate their own Facebook pages could not meet their accountability under the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “In view of the ongoing breach of the protection of personal data of users, I cannot wait any longer. If you operate a fan page, I therefore strongly recommend that you turn it off by the end of this year.”
If the Facebook pages were switched off, the federal government could lose considerable reach. The central page of the federal government has 870,000 fans and over a million subscribers on Facebook. Without their own pages, ministries and authorities can hardly react to critical comments that are distributed on the platform.