If I was hosting a site in Germany, I'd probably tend to switch hosting before I removed the "Like" button from my website.
If I was hosting a site in Germany, I'd probably tend to switch hosting before I removed the "Like" button from my website.
I hope so. Subjecting users to tracking by Google without their consent (you have no way to know that website X is tracking before it does) seems very abusive to me. Nothing prevents webmasters from installing tracking software on their own servers.
However, I've never heard of someone paying this fine.
I am german myself and fully agree with the privacy enforcing people in Germany and EU. Everytime you visit a website where someone added a Like button a whole set of tracking data will be submitted to US servers without a chance for me to forbid this. (Never saw a message "Is it ok for you that I load the Facebook Like button where your data will be transmitted to Facebook?") And after Facebook has a nearly complete profile over my web activities (every 2nd page already has a Like button) practically the US government also has all those data (edit: for fairness: everyone who pays for the data too)