A German court ruled, that Logfiles or Clickstream tracking hurt the right to self-determination and how people inform themselves in their live (vague translation
of “Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung). According to this court decision logfile analysis or clickstream data cannot be used anymore unless it is in an
“anonymized” way.
This court decision can not only “destroy” the entire web analytics industry in Germany, but also shut-down a lot of e-commerce sites, non-profit projects like
Wikipedia or any other German hosted site using a tracking solution. Having said above, at this point I would not panic. First of all this is a local court
(Amtsgericht) and I highly doubt that another court will decide the same way as this court did.
Still it is a very bad sign if Germany, a self-proclaimed high-tech country, makes absurd court decisions over and over again.
