Statement: Why you cannot find us on facebook

Although facebook is the largest social network in the world, we have as a company decided not to have a profile on the platform due to various reasons. First of all, the privacy policy and the general terms and conditions (GTC) you have to agree to are extremely vague and user-unfriendly. Most notably, for any kind of service facebook offers you have to grant a permit to the corporation for a worldwide licence allowing it to collect and use all your contents (texts, picture, videos, messages, etc.), both provided by yourself but also by others. Consequently, the contents still belong to you but you have to transfer the control completely to the social network. Above that, facebook cooperates with third firms and shares the collected data with them, thereby also transferring them to the US. Only at the end of the last year, the European Court of Justice clearly condemned the transfer of data to the US to be invalid. Also, the German consumer advice centre declared 19 provisions of the user conditions to be against the law and filed a suit against the corporation. Since facebook is not active in Germany, the Californian court is principally responsible, where self-evidently domestic law applies, which is regarding data security in relation to German standards sometimes more than questionable. Also the most recently idea presented by Mark Zuckerberg on a universal platform is by no means less worrying. In fact, it is an attempt to additionally control all contents on sites beyond facebook, while developing a network which the user is not supposed to leave anymore. The bottom line is that facebook is and remains an opaque platform in which not the user is in the foreground, but rather the interests of the corporation. All laws for the protection of personal data will be ineffective if they are constantly ignored by Internet companies. As an IT organisation with a focus on data protection and security, we would therefore like to call special attention to alternative open source solutions. One example in this regard is the diaspora* project: Instead of storing data on large centralised servers, which are part of a large organisation and are located in regions with questionable privacy policies, local servers (pods) can be set up anywhere in the world. You only need a diaspora-ID and may then decide yourself in which pod you want to register to use the social network. Thereby you will always retain the rights over your data. To conclude, it is definitely worthwhile to consider alternatives and to be perfectly aware of what you want to share with whom, when and where! More information can be found here.

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