Facebook wins ruling against regulator

Facebook Inc scored a victory in its battle against German privacy regulators who claim they can regulate the social network's policies. A Hamburg court halted enforcement of an order by the city's data watchdog who had told Facebook to allow users to sign up to the social network under a pseudonym. German law doesn't apply to Facebook's privacy policy, as its European headquarters are in Ireland, the court said in a preliminary ruling. Hamburg's data regulator Johannes Caspar and other German privacy watchdogs have been fighting with Facebook for years over the implementation of European data-protection rules.