!Important — Free wordpress.com blogs legally no more safe in Germany
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Dear forum,
I would like to bring your attention to a recent ruling from the district court in Berlin, Germany, that might render the free wordpress.com service useless in Germany and possibly other European countries with similar laws.
The ruling says that I (and thus any other user of the free wp.com service) must at all times make sure that the ads that Automattic posts show up marked correctly in German as “Werbung” instead of “advertisements”.
Since neither I nor other users have control over this in the free plan, I will have to shut down the site (or, of course, pay or move it).
I guess this ruling will also be applicable to other low-threshold services that allow users to blog by letting the provider show ads — and thus limit the freedom of speech.I assume(d) that Automattic makes sure theses things show up correctly in respective countries, since it means ad revenues for them.
Also, this should be rather trivial: ask from where the site is being called, plus the browser and/or system language and play out respective pics.SO, I’m asking the community — especially the German and European one — if there have been any problems with this in the recent past (say, two years).
I have reasonable doubt that the bill of complaint was made under correct circumstances:
1. I wasn’t able to easily reproduce the described behavior. And I haven’t read anything about wordpress.com not playing out ads correctly in the specialized press or in the forums. If this were the case, the press would have recommended users to stay away from wordpress.com.
This is how the site looked back in 2018 and looks now when I call it with an English set browser (Opera) _and_ American proxy: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vb4fyfr1ye44mi8/Werbeanzeigen-Wordpress.pdfAll fine by me.
I guess you can get ads marked as “advertisement” when you delete the German language from the browser and call the site via a proxy. But that is not normal behavior and would certainly not “confuse the undiscerning user”.
2. What strikes me is that in the original complaint (https://www.dropbox.com/s/95d2xil070y5y99/Screenshots-complaint.pdf) the screenshots show English ads (not only the label, the whole ad).
To me that means that the system thought the site was called from an English speaking region. It’s the same result I got after asking an American friend to call the site. Some ads were marked correctly in German, some in English. And I’m sure you can reproduce this behavior from anywhere with a bit of tweaking.
(Or does this mean that Automattic uses (or used) different services for posting ads that weren’t up to the task?)3. The complaint is a vengeance lawsuit, since I sued the company over illegally using my data for sending me spam. Apparently they don’t like that and were looking for something to hurt me with. (Well, this ruling will also possibly hurt other bloggers in the future.)
The lawyer actually told the judge that they were suing me out of spite.Since judges are seldom tech-savvy, they usually believe the suing lawyers. After all, why should they lie.
Well, these lawyers (or the company rather) didn’t like me poking around in their mafia-like organized spam business, and I guess they’ll go a long way to shut people up.Therefore my questions to the forum and especially German users AND Automattic are:
-Did you notice ads not being posted correctly in the past years?
-Please try out my or other free wp-sites in different browsers and of course with script- and ad-blockers turned off. The plantiff claims this behavior is reproducible in Chrome and Cliqz.
(The sites are here (https://bonck.wordpress.com) and (https://jedentagberlin.wordpress.com) until I shut them down in the next days to abide by the ruling.)-Are there any wp programmers (possibly even from Automattic) who can tell me how these scripts work, since when they (are supposed to) work and how you can (easily) circumvent their proper working.
(If I can prove that the case was built deliberately, I might be able to overturn this ruling.)This is really not about me. I’m happy to switch off the blogs since they were only a mental scrapbook of mine anyway. But I’d hate to see freedom of speech restricted by rulings that might affect other bloggers and low-threshold services to exercise that important human right.
These new laws from the past years about cookies and data protection and privacy really are a two-sided sword. On the one hand the public needs to be informed about and protected from possible misuse. On the other hand they should not be an open door for sue-happy companies and lawyers in order to shut up people and journalists.So, forum and Automattic, I’m eager to hear your opinion on this.
Sorry for the long post, but this seems important to me.
Best regards
Boris
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Our legal team will look into this, meanwhile I recommend reading over https://automattic.com/automattic-and-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/ and https://automattic.com/privacy/
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I got your e-mail, thank your for that.
This is not primarily about privacy but showing ads on your free service.“Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others
Ads appearing on any of our Services may be delivered by advertising networks.”
The big question is why does Automattic (or other ad networks) play out ads not marked correctly in the language of the respective country? Or not at all marked as in this pop-up banner on the second page:
Click to access Screenshots-bonck-wordpress-com.pdf
This is not new legal regulation and I wonder why this hasn’t been addressed by Automattic so far.
This renders the free service of wordpress.com useless in most European countries. -
We translate the Advertisments heading based on the what the blog language is set to.
If I change my site to German, I see Werbeanzeigen instead.
Is the site not set as German?
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It is set to German.
Another user (in this German thread: https://wordpress.com/de/forums/topic/kostenloses-wordpress-com-angebot-in-d-nicht-mehr-rechtssicher/#post-63278)
posted this example:
Note that the ads are in German, but it says “Sponsored” and “Report this ad”. Legally not acceptable.
Also note that in my example in post #3549955 there are both ways on the same page, labels in German and English, although both ads are in German.
But I do also get ads in English occasionally.It seems to me that Automattic plays out ads over different contractors and not all abide by the rules.
This is a huge problem, very costly for me now and puts every German user (and possibly any user in other European non-English speaking countries with similar laws) at risk of getting sued.
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