(Thumb)nail in the coffin for the prohibition on monitoring?

Article 15(1) of the E-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) has long been a useful weapon in the armoury of social media platforms and search engines by prohibiting a “general monitoring obligation”. This, they argue, means that they can only be required to remove specific unlawful content that is identified by the complainant or court, but no more. The problem with this is that it is very easy for the unlawful content to be spread far and wide and the complainant is required to play whac-a-mole, identifying every repetition and variation of that content.

In today’s judgment in Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek v Facebook Ireland Limited (Case C-18/18), the CJEU has given important guidance in relation to the removal of content which contains identical wording to the original unlawful content or which has “equivalent” content.

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Facebook, drag artists and data protection dilemmas: ‘if you stand on our pitch, you must play by our rules’

Facebook is one of the main battlegrounds between privacy and other social goods such as safety and security.

On the one hand, it faces a safeguarding challenge. Interactions through Facebook have the potential to cause harm: defamation, data protection breaches, stalking, harassment, abuse and the like. One safeguard against such harms is to ensure that users are identifiable, i.e. that they really are who they say they are. This facilitates accountability and helps to ensure that only users of an appropriate age are communicating on Facebook. The ongoing litigation before the Northern Irish courts in the HL case raises exactly these sorts of concerns about child protection.

Part of the solution is Facebook’s ‘real names’ policy: you cannot register using a pseudonym, but only with your official identity.

On the other hand, Facebook encounters an argument which runs like this: individuals should be free to decide how they project themselves in their communications with the world. This means that, provided they are doing no harm, they should in principle be allowed to use whatever identity they like, including pseudonyms, working names (for people who wish to keep their private Facebooking and their professional lives separate) or stage names (particularly relevant for drag artists, for example). The real names policy arguably undermines this element of human autonomy, dignity and privacy. There have been colourful recent protests against the policy on these sorts of grounds.

Which is the stronger argument? Well, the answer to the question seems to depend on who you ask, and where you ask.

The Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland, where Facebook has its EU headquarters, has upheld the real names policy. When one of Germany’s regional Data Protection Commissioners (Schleswig-Holstein) took the opposite view, Facebook challenged his ruling and secured a court victory in 2013. The German court suspended the order against the real names policy and, equally importantly, decided that the challenge should proceed in Ireland, not Germany.

This week, however, another German decision turned the tables on the real names policy yet again. The Hamburg data protection authority upheld a complaint from someone who used a pseudonym on Facebook so as to separate her private and professional communications. The Hamburg DPA found against Facebook and held that it was not allowed unilaterally to change users’ chosen usernames to their real names. Nor was it entitled to demand official identification documents – an issue of particular relevance to child protection issues such as those arising in HL.

The Hamburg ruling is notable on a number of fronts. It exemplifies the tension between privacy – in all its nuanced forms – and other values. It illustrates the dilemmas bedevilling the business models of social media companies such as Facebook.

The case also highlights real challenges for the future of European data protection. The General Data Protection Regulation – currently clawing its way from draft to final form – aspires to harmonised pan-European standards. It includes a mechanism for data protection authorities to co-operate and resolve differences. But if authorities within the same country are prone to divergence on issues such as the real names policy, how optimistic can one be that regulators across the EU will sing from the same hymn sheet?

Important questions arise about data protection and multinational internet companies: in which country (or region, for that matter) should a user raise a complaint to a regulator? If they want to complain to a court, where do they do that? If a German user complains to an Irish regulator or court, to what extent do those authorities have to consider German law?

For the moment, Facebook clearly seeks home ground advantage. But its preference for the Irish forum was rejected by the Hamburg authority in this week’s ruling. He is reported as saying that “… Facebook cannot again argue that only Irish Data Protection law would be applicable … anyone who stands on our pitch also has to play our game”.

The draft Regulation has something to say on these matters, but is far from clear as to how to decide on the right pitch and the right rules for vital privacy battles like these.

Robin Hopkins @hopkinsrobin

Facebook, child protection and outsourced monitoring

Facebook is no stranger to complaints about the content of posts. Usually, one user complains to Facebook about what other users’ posts say about him. By making the offending posts available, Facebook is processing the complainant’s personal data, and must do so in compliance with data protection law.

More unusually, a user could also complain about their own Facebook posts. Surely a complainant cannot make data protection criticisms about information they deliberately posted about themselves? After all, Facebook processes those posts with the author’s consent, doesn’t it?

Generally, yes – but that will not necessarily be true in every instance, especially when it comes to Facebook posts by children. This is the nature of the complaint in striking litigation currently afoot before the High Court in Northern Ireland.

The case is HL v Facebook Inc, Facebook Ireland Ltd, the Northern Health & Social Care Trust and DCMS [2015] NIQB 61. It is currently only in its preliminary stages, but it raises very interesting and important issues about Facebook’s procedures for preventing underage users from utilising the social network. Those issues are illuminated in the recent judgment of Stephen J, who is no stranger to claims against Facebook – he heard the recent case of CG v Facebook [2015] NIQB 11, concerning posts about a convicted paedophile.

From the age of 11 onwards, HL maintained a Facebook page on which she made posts of an inappropriate sexual nature. She was exposed to responses from sexual predators. She says that Facebook is liable for its failure to prevent her from making these posts. She alleges that Facebook (i) unlawfully processed her sensitive personal data, (ii) facilitated her harassment by others, and (iii) was negligent in failing to have proper systems in place to minimise the risks of children setting up Facebook accounts by lying about their age.

The data protection claim raises a number of issues of great importance to the business of Facebook and others with comparable business models. One is the extent to which a child can validly consent to the processing of their personal data – especially sensitive personal data. Minors are (legitimately or not) increasingly active online, and consent is a cornerstone of online business. The consent issue is of one of wide application beyond the HL litigation.

A second issue is whether, in its processing of personal data, Facebook does enough to stop minors using their own personal data in ways which could harm them. In her claim, for example, HL refers to evidence given to a committee of the Australian Parliament – apparently by a senior privacy advisor to Facebook (though Facebook was unable to tell Stephens J who he was). That evidence apparently said that Facebook removes 20,000 under-age user profiles a day.

Stephens J was also referred to comments apparently made by a US Senator to Mark Zuckerberg about the vulnerability of underage Facebook users.

Another element of HL’s case concerns Facebook’s use of an outsourcing company called oDesk, operating for example from Morocco, to moderate complaints about Facebook posts. She calls into question the adequacy of these oversight measures: ‘where then is the oversight body for these underpaid global police?’ (to quote from a Telegraph article referred to in the recent HL judgment). Facebook says that – given its number of users in multiple languages across the globe – effective policing is a tall order (an argument J summed up at paragraph 22 as ‘the needle in a haystack argument, there is just too much to monitor, the task of dealing with underage users is impossible’).

In short, HL says that Facebook seems to be aware of the scale and seriousness of the problem of underage use of its network and has not done enough to tackle that problem.

Again, the issue is one of wider import for online multinationals for whom personal data is stock-in-trade.

The same goes for the third important data protection issue surfacing in the HL litigation. This concerns jurisdiction, cross-border data controllers and section 5 of the Data Protection Act 1998. For example, is Facebook Ireland established in the UK by having an office, branch or agency, and does it process the personal data in Facebook posts in the context of that establishment?

These issues are all still to be decided. Stephens J’s recent judgment in HL was not about the substantive issues, but about HL’s applications for specific discovery and interrogatories. He granted those applications. In addition to details of HL’s Facebook account usage, he ordered the Facebook defendants to disclose agreements between them and Facebook (UK) Ltd and between them and o-Desk (to whom some moderating processes were outsourced). He has also ordered the Facebook defendants to answer interrogatory questions about their procedures for preventing underage Facebook use.

In short, the HL litigation has – thus far – raised difficult data protection and privacy issues which are fundamental to Facebook’s business, and it has required Facebook to lay bare internal details of its safeguarding practices. The case is only just beginning. The substantive hearing, which is listed for next term, could groundbreaking.

Robin Hopkins @hopkinsrobin

Austria will not host Europe vs Facebook showdown

As illustrated by Anya Proops’ recent post on a Hungarian case currently before the CJEU, the territorial jurisdiction of European data protection law can raise difficult questions.

Such questions have bitten hard in the Europe vs Facebook litigation. Max Schrems, an Austrian law graduate, is spearheading a massive class action in which some 25,000 Facebook users allege numerous data protection violations by the social media giant. Those include: unlawful obtaining of personal data (including via plug-ins and “like” buttons); invalid consent to Facebook’s processing of users’ personal data; use of personal data for impermissible purposes, including the unlawful analysing of data/profiling of users (“the Defendant analyses the data available on every user and tries to explore users’ interests, preferences and circumstances…”); unlawful sharing of personal data with third parties and third-party applications. The details of the claim are here.

Importantly, however, the claim is against Facebook Ireland Ltd, a subsidiary of the Californian-based Facebook Inc. The class action has been brought in Austria.

Facebook challenged the Austrian court’s jurisdiction. Last week, it received a judgment in its favour from the Viennese Regional Civil Court. The Court said it lacks jurisdiction in part because Mr Schrems is not deemed to be a ‘consumer’ of Facebook’s services. In part also, it lacks jurisdiction because Austria is not the right place to be bringing the claim. Facebook argued that the claim should be brought either in Ireland or in California, and the Court agreed.

Mr Schrems has announced his intention to appeal. In the meantime, the Austrian decision will continue to raise both eyebrows and questions, particularly given that a number of other judgments in recent years have seen European courts accepting jurisdiction to hear claims against social media companies (such as Google: see Vidal-Hall, for example) based elsewhere.

The Austrian decision also highlights the difficulties of the ‘one-stop shop’ principle which remains part of the draft Data Protection Regulation (albeit in more nuanced and complicated formulation than had earlier been proposed). In short, why should an Austrian user have to sue in Ireland?

Panopticon will report on any developments in this case in due course. It will also report on the other strand of Mr Schrems’ privacy campaign, namely his challenge to the lawfulness of the Safe Harbour regime for the transferring of personal data to the USA. That challenge has been heard by the CJEU, and the Advocate General’s opinion is imminent. The case will have major implications for those whose business involves transatlantic data transfers.

Robin Hopkins @hopkinsrobin

Facebook, FOI and children

The Upper Tribunal has got its teeth into personal data disputes on a number of occasions in recent months – Edem was followed by Farrand, and now Surrey Heath Borough Council v IC and Morley [2014] UKUT 0330 (AAC): Morley UT decision. Panopticon reported on the first-instance Morley decision in 2012. In brief: Mr Morley asked for information about members of the local authority’s Youth Council who had provided input into a planning application. The local authority withheld the names of the Youth Councillors (who were minors) under s. 40(2) of FOAI (personal data). In a majority decision, the First-Tier Tribunal ordered that some of those names be disclosed, principally on the grounds that it seemed that they appeared on the Youth Council’s (closed) Facebook page.

The local authority and the ICO challenged that decision. The Upper Tribunal (Judge Jacobs) has agreed with them. He found the dissenting opinion of the First-Tier Tribunal member to have been the more sophisticated (as opposed to the overly generalised analysis of the majority) and ultimately correct. The Youth Councillors’ names were correctly withheld.

In his analysis of the First Data Protection Principle, Judge Jacobs was not much bothered by whether fairness or condition 6(1) (the relevant Schedule 2 condition) should be considered first: “the latter is but a specific instance of the former”.

Judge Jacobs found that there was no sufficient interest in the disclosure of the names of the Youth Councillors. He also rejected the argument that, by putting their names on the relevant Facebook page, the data subjects had implicitly consented to public disclosure of their identities in response to such a FOIA request.

Judge Jacobs stopped short, however, of finding that the personal data of minors should never be disclosed under FOIA, i.e. that the (privacy) interests of children would always take precedence over transparency. Maturity and autonomy matter more than mere age in this context, and sometimes (as here) minors are afforded substantial scope to make their own decisions.

Morley is an important case on the intersection between children’s personal data and transparency, particularly in the social media context, but – as Judge Jacobs himself observed – “it is by no means the last word on the subject”.

There were 11KBW appearances by Joseph Barrett (for the local authority) and Heather Emmerson (for the ICO).

Robin Hopkins @hopkinsrobin

Facebook fan pages: data protection buck stops with Facebook, not page owners

In Re Facebook, VG, Nos. 8 A 37/12, 8 A 14/12, 8 A 218/11, 10/9/13 the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court has allowed Facebook’s appeals against rulings of the regional data protection authority (the ULD), Thilo Weichert.

The case involved a number of companies’ use of Facebook fan pages. The ULD’s view was that Facebook breached German privacy law, including through its use of cookies, facial recognition and other data processing. He considered that, by using Facebook fan pages, the companies were facilitating Facebook’s violations by processing users’ personal data on those pages. He ordered them to shut down the fan pages or face fines of up to €50,000.

The appellant companies argued that they could not be held responsible for data protection violations (if any) allegedly committed by Facebook, as they had no control over how that data on the pages was processed and used by the social networking site. The Administrative Court agreed.

The case raises interesting questions about where the buck stops in terms of data processing – both in terms of who controls the processing, and in terms of where they are based. Facebook is based in Ireland, without a substantive operational presence in Germany. Earlier this year, the Administrative Court found – again against the Schleswig-Holstein ULD’s ruling – that Facebook’s ‘real names’ policy (i.e. a ban on pseudonymised profiles) was a matter for Irish rather than German law.

The ULD is unlikely to be impressed by the latest judgment, given that he is reported as having said in 2011 that:

“We see a much bigger privacy issue behind the Facebook case: the main business model of Google, Apple, Amazon and others is based on privacy law infringements. This is the reason why Facebook and all the other global internet players are so reluctant in complying with privacy law: they would lose their main profit resource.”

For more on this story, see links here and here.

Robin Hopkins