ECJ ruling on joint data slurpers

Organisations that deploy Facebook's ubiquitous "Like" button on their websites risk falling foul of the General Data Protection Regulation following a landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice.

The EU's highest court has decided that website owners can be held liable for data collection when using the so-called "social sharing" widgets.

The ruling (PDF) states that employing such widgets would make the organisation a joint data controller, along with Facebook – and judging by its recent record, you don't want to be anywhere near Zuckerberg's antisocial network when privacy regulators come a-calling.

According to the court, website owners "must provide, at the time of their collection, certain information to those visitors such as, for example, its identity and the purposes of the [data] processing".

By extension, the ECJ's decision also applies to services like Twitter and LinkedIn.
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