It may have been quite a while since you signed up for Facebook, but if you read the fine print, you are technically required to use your birth name on the social network instead of making one up. Of course if you look through your list of friends, chances are that there will probably be a few that using fake names, including nicknames. Obviously the real name policy isn’t strictly enforced, but Germany wants Facebook to change their policy to allow the use of a fake name to meet the German data protection laws.
Facebook doesn’t fully agree with Germany on this one and considers it to be without merit and they feel that the current policy meets the rules of the European data protection policies. The social network company plans to fight Germany on the order and has two weeks to challenge it in the German court.
Germany has a track record of challenging popular American social media and data gathering sites like Google and Facebook to make changes to policies that better fit the country’s laws. In most cases, these websites are required to make the necessary changes in Germany, and this case will probably see a similar outcome.
Source: BBC
