Stricter data protection
The same goes for
other personal data, including email addresses and telephone numbers. You can allow
Facebook to access these details from your smartphone or email account, in
order to help it find you other acquaintances for you. This is allowed in most
countries including the USA, but some countries such as Germany have stricter
data protection laws under which this is illegal.
eBay shops are warned the most often,
now Facebook shops are threatened with the same
A comparatively newer
risk is that of sharing Web videos, which are usually in the form of embedded
YouTube clips. YouTube's terms of use allow videos to be embedded, appearing
exactly like you have embedded them directly on your own website or blog. But
if the content of the videos itself is illegal, could will be trouble. Anyone
who posts a link to a copyright protected video is considered to have infringed
the law and is liable as an abettor.
The legal position
here is not very user friendly, since the law considers it unimportant whether
you yourself have uploaded the videos on YouTube. Additionally, it might not
matter in court whether you as a user recognized that the video violated
copyrights—something that is not often possible or reasonable.
In case of doubt,
since the copyright holders can initiate an injunction, ask for compensation,
and even claim damages— which could amount to a lot of money.
How to avoid unnecessary legal trouble
The
legal regulations for the rights of an artist or personality apply on social
networks too. Follow the tips given below to be on the safer side.
The Licence For Sharing
If you want to share content from the
web, for example images or texts, search for the concerned website for
licences. In case of Creative Common licences (CC), it is easy to understand
whether and how the image or text can be used. But be careful to credit the
appropriate source (name of the author).
Make Yourself Invisible
Adjust the basic settings of the
social networks. In the default settings, Facebook publishes all your images
and posts for the entire web. That makes it easy for the lawyers to discover
misuses. Therefore, change the settings under ‘Account | Privacy settings |
Sharing content on Facebook’ to 'Only friends'.
This way, your posts and images will
remain private. That does not protect you from legal infringements, but from
being discovered. In Google+, you can use the option of sharing your posts
only with your "circles", that is only with people with whom you
are directly connected. If you post it publically, everyone will be able to
see it.
Privacy
- In this menu, you can determine who can see your Facebook posts—and thus
save yourself from the lawyers
