Germany's rising Pirate Party made a step towards anonymous SIM card activation after it filed an appeal in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, stating that anonymous communication is protected under the European Convention on Human Rights' right to private life.

One should note that this court is not a European Union institution, it is part of the Council of Europe which consists of 47 countries, thus, the legal decision of this court will not be binding to Germany, however, knowing the political climate there, one should expect that there will be repercussions on its government if it doesn't follow the courts findings.

German officials accused Facebook for using user data and pictures for facial recognition without consent. Even though the user can opt-out, the European data protection law requires this kind of services to ask for explicit user permissions, that is, Facebook's defaults should be set to 'do not use my data'. Germany's demands are that Facebook destroy's all data collected from German citizens.