Already years ago the legal department of the Heise Verlag, publisher of German's biggest IT news site (which is interestingly also one of the biggest German in

Already years ago the legal department of the Heise Verlag, publisher of German's biggest IT news site (which is interestingly also one of the biggest German internet sites in general), came to the conclusion that it's actually legally not possible to embed "social widgets" on their site as those widgets would send personal data to their US based "mother ships" without explicit user consent. To circumvent this problem they developed a kind of wrapper around those widgets that won't load the widget (which will than of course inevitably trigger transfer of personal data to the social network in question) until explicitly clicked by the user. This solution was than published under an open-source license so it can be used by any interested webmaster. It's called "Heise Shariff" and can be found on GitHub [1]. [1] https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff