After all services belonging to the Facebook group such as Whatsapp and Instagram had failed for several hours, there are now calls for stronger regulation.
Hamburg’s acting data protection officer Ulrich Kühn has called for stricter regulation of social networks after the hours of failure of Facebook services.
“The consistent enforcement of data protection requirements in Europe would be a necessary first step,” said Kühn of the “Augsburger Allgemeine”. He expects that efforts to regulate the Facebook group more closely will also increase internationally.
“In the US, Facebook is currently under considerable political pressure because of its non-transparent business practices,” said Kühn. His authority is responsible for Facebook in Germany. The failure made it clear how much Facebook has now linked its social networks. “That all major services – Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram – were affected at the same time, shows the close proximity of these products and their ever greater merging with one another.”
“The ongoing efforts to interlink the services in terms of content and to use data from one service for the other weigh more heavily,” said Kühn. Here, however, his authority was unable to enforce at European level to prohibit the use of personal WhatsApp data for Facebook purposes. The failure also shows how much Facebook is operated in Europe, contrary to other statements from the USA. «The apparent independence of the European provider Facebook Ireland Ltd. and WhatsApp Ireland Ltd. consists mainly on paper. “
Technical problems with Facebook and its daughters WhatsApp and Instagram led to an outage of around six hours on Monday.
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
