In the challenge by Ilse Aigner, the German minister of consumer protection, to Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old founder of Facebook, it is hard to say who is the David. Mrs Aigner accuses Facebook of being careless over the privacy of its 400m members. “What is private must stay private,” she wrote to Mr Zuckerberg on April 5th. “Unfortunately, Facebook ignores this principle.” Shape up, Mrs Aigner warned, or she would quit the social-networking site.Mrs Aigner fired her slingshot after Facebook had said it might send data on members to hand-picked partners such as CNN and Yahoo! without consulting them first. The American way with data is not for Germany. In 1983 Germany’s constitutional court elaborated a right to “informational self-determination”, anchored in laws, monitored by officials and fiercely defended by activists. The Pirate Party, which champions digital freedom, won 2% of the vote in last year’s federal election.
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