Data Protection Activists Want More Regulation Amid Facebook Failure

After lengthy outages on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram in the past few days, the Hamburg data protection activist Ulrich Kühn is now calling for the company to be regulated more. The failure had shown how closely interlinked the services are.

It is precisely this interlocking that is a thorn in the side of data protectionists around the world – especially because the user can hardly see through it. Now Ulrich Kühn, as Hamburg’s data protection officer responsible for Facebook in Germany, is calling for the US group to intervene with clearer and stronger regulation. In an interview with Augsburger Allgemeine, the data protection officer emphasized that the failure had also shown how dependent the individual services of the group are on the servers in the USA. Because the global outage a few days ago was based on a problem with the network administration. The fact that all of the group’s major services were equally affected shows how well the interlinking is now.

Growing criticism

Kühn made it clear that Germany is not alone with its demands against Facebook: “Efforts to regulate the Facebook group more closely will probably increase. In the USA, Facebook is currently under considerable political pressure because of its non-transparent business practices,” said Kühn.

There are also some concrete approaches to break the market power: “One of the discussed variants is breaking up or separating individual services,” Kuhn explained to the Augsburger Allgemeine. The data protection activist sees the need for the EU to start working together to enforce the data protection requirements. So far there has been a lack of cooperation or a common consensus.