Facebook has been battling users who either don’t exist in real life or are using a pseudonym, but the company has met resistance in Germany. However, a judge ruled Wednesday in an appeal case that German privacy laws (which would allow users to have whatever name they want on the social network) do not apply to Facebook, as the company’s European base is in Ireland, where regulations are more lax.
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Facebook’s good fortune in courtrooms extended overseas, as the administrative court for the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein sided with the social network and suspended the enforcement of an order that it allow users to register under pseudonyms.
The data-protection commissioner for the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Thilo Weichert, took his campaign against Facebook’s insistence that users provide their real names up a notch, threatening to fine the social network £16,000 ($20,877) if it refuses to abolish that policy.
Facebook and Germany are at odds again, this time over whether the social network’s insistence that users provide their real names conflicts with the country’s data-protection law that permits the use of pseudonyms.
