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Germany Seeks Tighter Facebook Controls After `Intolerable' Leak

Germany Seeks Tighter Facebook Controls After `Intolerable' Leak

(Bloomberg) -- German Justice Minister Katarina Barley called Facebook Inc.’s handling of private data “intolerable” and said the government will tighten oversight of the social network.

Pledges by Facebook officials at a meeting in Berlin to disclose how many users were affected in the Cambridge Analytica data breach, inform the users and examine making algorithms more transparent were insufficient, Barley said.

“The promises are not enough,” she told reporters after talks with company officials including Facebook’s head of public policy for Europe, Richard Allan. “We’ll need much tighter supervision of companies like Facebook in the future.”

Governments across Europe have taken Facebook to task since revelations that the company allowed Cambridge Analytics to harvest data from millions of users.

In Germany, where the government and the public are particularly sensitive about the treatment of private information, lawmakers have been raising pressure on Facebook to guarantee privacy.

Barley said authorities will have to act more “bluntly, quickly and sensitively” against violations of data-privacy laws. She demanded that Facebook users gain more control over privacy settings.

To contact the reporters on this story: Patrick Donahue in Berlin at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net, Birgit Jennen in Berlin at bjennen1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Crawford at acrawford6@bloomberg.net, Tony Czuczka, Chad Thomas

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