Facebook has been ordered to curb its data collection practices in Germany after a landmark ruling on Thursday that the world’s largest social network abused its market dominance to gather information about users without their consent. Germany, where privacy concerns run deep, is in the forefront of a global backlash against Facebook, fuelled by last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal in which tens of millions of Facebook profiles were harvested without their users’ consent. “In future, Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook accounts,” Federal Cartel Office chief Andreas Mundt said.
