The Schleswig-Holstein Question...

[Gerald]

Facebook has agreed to work with the German government to develop a code of conduct governing privacy on social networking sites. But why is this one country so reluctant to share online?

Facebook and Google want to improve the way we discover information and interact with one another, while selling us things along the way.

Many people see nothing wrong with the way these and other online companies monitor use of their systems to work out who might want to buy what, but the situation is different in Germany.

It is not as if the companies' services are unpopular there - a quarter of the German population are active Facebook users and Google has 95% of the country's search market.

However, German citizens and their regulators are becoming well-known for giving these giants of the web a hard time.

In August, the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection (ULD) in Schleswig-Holstein banned all organisations in the state from having Facebook fan pages and embedding 'Like' buttons on their websites. The ULD said citizens were being monitored without realising it.

Earlier that month, privacy officials in Hamburg said Facebook could be fined for keeping biometric data collected through the site's facial recognition system.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14859813


Note: 10 September 2011 Last updated at 08:36 GMT