A study by the Association of German Website Operators (FdWB) has shown that over 41 percent of the pages have serious deficiencies, which means they violate legal provisions and are at high risk for warnings.
In order to operate a website in Germany, an increasing number of legal provisions and mandatory requirements, of German or European origin, must be observed. The best known of these are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Telemedia Act (TMG), the ePrivacy Directive or the new ruling by the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) on the active consent to the use of cookies.
Although many of these requirements are important and useful, it is now very difficult for website operators to keep track of them. Not just to have legal certainty and to avoid the danger of warnings. But above all to protect against increasingly widespread and more professionally carried out cyber attacks, the resulting theft of own and customer data or even the total loss of your own website and the associated lasting loss of reputation of your own company. In addition, the regulations and judgments as well as the increasing attention paid to this topic in the media show that the public is attaching ever greater importance to online security.
SSL certificates for encrypted data connection
In order to get an up-to-date impression of the state and security of German websites, the Association of German Website Operators (FdWB) carried out a study on 2,500 randomly selected websites in March this year and examined them for particularly characteristic features. For this purpose, the FdWB looked at business directory entries from small and medium-sized companies in various industries from across Germany. The characteristics considered included whether the websites have an active and functioning SSL certificate for an encrypted data connection, whether the company data is fully contained in the data protection declaration and whether the data protection declaration is properly linked on every page.
The result was that of the total of 2,500 pages, 1,023 websites were identified that did not meet at least one of these criteria. In other words, this means that 41 percent of all pages viewed are faulty and therefore in very poor condition and were not safe for both website operators and users.
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