The Court of Justice of the European Union has recently stated
in a decision that administrators of fan pages (like Facebook) must
be considered data controllers, despite the fact that the audience
statistics compiled by Facebook are transmitted to the fan page
administrator only in anonymised form.
The administrator may, with the help of filters made available
by Facebook, define the criteria how the statistics are to be drawn
up and even designate the categories of persons whose personal data
should Facebook use to produce the statistics. Consequently, the
administrator of a fan page hosted on Facebook contributes to the
processing of the personal data of visitors to its page. In these
circumstances, the administrator of a fan page hosted on Facebook
must be regarded as taking part, by defining the parameters, in the
determination of the purposes and means of processing the personal
data of the visitors to its fan page.
