As a German, i'm glad that our governments care about privacy laws. Besides the ridiculousness of the Street View debacle most privacy laws in Germany are right where they should be, bordering on not strong enough.

Facebook clearly behaved intransparent and outright unfriendly with regards to data protection, therefor its fair to come down that hard on the service.

Or many people would just go "meh, guess I'll use something else then". Facebook is just not that big of a deal to most people, it's pretty easy to provide a similar service. Facebook knows this and wouldn't take a chance alienating the whole European population, many of whom are already itching to switch to something else, just looking for an excuse.

exactly. let's face it (hurr hurr), the one big asset of facebook.. is that everybody uses it.

or can you name even just one other feature nobody else does better (and please don't let it be farmville). I couldn't think of one so far, any input would be appreciated..

does anybody do all of the features of Facebook as well as Facebook does?

well, if they don't do a single feature right, then of course the sum of that isn't great either. so far nobody mentioned a single thing facebook is good at..

Who? The politicians?

Indeed, 17 year olds don't vote in most countries. Their inconvenience is of little concern to me.

It is the epiotome of arrogance to serve your own interests by trampling those of others, regardless of how annoying you find their demographic to be. By this attitude, 17 year olds are perfectly within their rights to say "their privacy is of little concern to me" about your age group, and act accordingly.

sorry, didn't mean it in a "racist" or "doesn't affect me" kind of way, just that they are minor children, and will thank the adults later for taking care of their long term interests.

I'm 28, but on behalf of all those who are legally powerless and who have other people 'looking after their longterm best interests' we'd prefer you didn't.

Yeah, I get that from one of my teenage daughters, as well. Alas, it's the one who most needs to listen up.

At 28, you darn well better be taking care of yourself. However, I suspect you have not had to deal with adolescent children yet.

It's one thing to take care of your own children. It's entirely another to change the law to "take care of" everyone else's. The second requires far greater justification and consent from those who would be affected by the law (those 17 year olds who are a year away from voting, for example).

Perhaps, but I'd wager that the copyright lobby uses the same justification for their own anti-consumer actions.

I believe one must be careful not to use the same means, even though improving the privacy of Facebook users and non-users alike is a worthy end.

In all of Austria and already some parts of Germany, the voting age is 16.