for a final decision by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig had submitted a specific case in Luxembourg for clarification.
What had happened? The Schleswig-Holstein data protection supervisory authority had issued a prohibition order against various companies regarding the operation of a Facebook fan page. The order was based on alleged data protection violations by Facebook and an assumed joint responsibility of the fan page operators. The data protection supervisory authority's criticism focused on the Facebook analytics service "Insights".
Brock Müller Ziegenbein represented a company against the data protection authority's ruling: After we had already successfully challenged the prohibition order for our client at first and second instance as part of a kind of "test case", the Federal Administrative Court (Ref. 1 C 28.14) has now decided to refer some questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for clarification. The decision is still pending. Until then, everything will remain the same for the time being and the fan page can still be operated.
Waiting for the ECJ decision
The proceedings regarding the admissibility of the Facebook fan page have a signal effect for every operator. The data protection supervisory authorities in Germany will await clarification from the ECJ. For the time being, it cannot be assumed that they will object to the operation due to general data protection concerns. In this respect, a certain degree of legal certainty has been created for the time being.
However, this does not mean that everything is now permitted on a Facebook fan page. Rather, the same principles apply on Facebook as on the rest of the Internet. This applies in particular to the labeling and imprint obligations, compliance with general legal principles and, of course, compliance with data protection requirements when processing personal data independently.
Dr. Christian Wolff