with Judgment of 11/25/2021 a ten-year legal dispute has now come to a (temporary) end. The Schleswig-Holstein Higher Administrative Court (OVG Schleswig) ruled that the operation of a Facebook fan page by Wirtschaftsakademie Schleswig-Holstein GmbH at the relevant time in December 2011 was accompanied by a serious breach of data protection regulations.
In December 2011, the ULD ordered the business academy to deactivate the Facebook fan page it operated due to violations of data protection law. After legal recourse had been taken to the Federal Administrative Court, the latter submitted a number of questions to the ECJ, which the ECJ answered in its decision of June 5, 2018 to the effect that the operators of a Facebook fan page are to be regarded as joint controllers with Facebook. It was thus clear that fan page operators could be the addressees of a regulatory measure regarding their fan page, precisely because they are also responsible for it under data protection law and cannot just use an offer from Facebook without being responsible for it.
Whether the measure, which was aimed at deactivating the fan page, can also endure in the matter was not a question that could be decided by the ECJ, which is why the proceedings were then first returned to the Federal Administrative Court and now to the OVG Schleswig, which now decided that the deactivation order was lawful. The OVG Schleswig has detected a serious violation in the use of personal data of people registered and logged into the Facebook network. This use of data is neither permitted by law nor have the users consented to it. In addition, the persons concerned were not sufficiently informed about all data collection and use processes that were initiated by visiting a fan page.
The reasons for the judgment and further information will be published under the following link:
https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/facebook/
Source: ULD Schleswig-Holstein
Further supporting information on data protection can be found in these articles:
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