Well, a high court in Germany has said that the feature is “unlawful”, that encourages users to market Facebook to their contacts.
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It is a sneaky way of Facebook getting the email addresses of people who have no intention of signing up with them, which is something of a worry.
The Facebook feature invites users to grant it permission to harvest the e-mail addresses of friends or contacts in users’ address books, in turn allowing the social network to send an invitation to non-users to join the social network.
Facebook’s European legal challenges continue to mount up after a court ruled that the social network’s “friend finder” feature was violating laws on data protection and unfair trade practices.
This decision could also pave the way for the Federation of German Consumer Organizations to clamp down on other online networks that utilize this form of marketing.
You know the “Friend Finder” feature on Facebook?
The Supreme Court also ruled that Facebook did not make it clear enough to users what it does with the data that members upload when using the friend-finder feature.
The Federal Court of Justice ruled that this constitutes advertising harassment. Friend Finder now allows users to control exactly which of their contacts’ addresses they wish to import and allows recipients of invitation emails to block future messages from the service.
A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters that the company would study the finding “to assess any impact on our services”.
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The VZBV welcomed the decision and said in a statement that it will have implications for other companies in Germany that use similar forms of promotional advertising to attract new users. “They must now probably rethink”, said Mueller.
