Sharing posts on social media such as Facebook or X with a WordPress website is not a problem in itself. If you want a GDPR-compliant plugin, you often won't find one straight away.
Many are likely familiar with the Shariff Plugin, which enables a Two-Click Solution for social media plugins. The Open Source Tool provided by Heise Publishing loads tools like the Facebook Widget or Twitter Widget only after a user has confirmed the data protection regulations.
The problem here are the data protection declaration and the still existing liability Risk. The data protection notices for opaque data vampires like Facebook cannot be declared seriously transparent. Nobody knows what the Facebook Corporation does with the received data. Therefore, a consent query can hardly be designed legally secure. One would have to give the worst possible explanation ("… Data can be distributed and processed worldwide by any third parties for any purposes.…").
Tools like Facebook or X's share functions are considered tracking, because they track users. It would be better to have ordinary links for sharing posts in WordPress. Then one could finally sleep peacefully again and wouldn't have to worry about any data protection issues.
Social Media Share Buttons
The WordPress-plugin MashShare does exactly what a data protector wishes: It automatically inserts share buttons for Facebook and X into every post. When a user clicks on one of these buttons, a new window opens. This window opens the website of Facebook or Twitter. Thus, the operator of the WordPress-website is relieved from responsibility, because the user then finds himself on facebook.com or x.com.
The Share Buttons in a WordPress Post look like this:
In the options of the plugin, it can be set whether these buttons should appear at the beginning or end of a post, or in both positions. It is also possible to display the current number of shares. For this purpose, the plugin MashShare uses a service named sharedcount.com.
I don't use this service from Sharedcount. My short test with Sharedcount activated has at least shown that no connection to sharedcount.com was made in the user's browser. I assume that the plugin retrieves the number of shares in the background. If my assumption is correct, it uses MashShare, a server-to-server connection. This would be GDPR-compliant because no user data such as their IP-address are being transferred.
I am very satisfied with the plugin and can recommend it. You can see it in action in each of my posts.
I would be delighted to receive feedback on this and other share plugins for WordPress, and I would also be delighted if you subscribe to my newsletter.
Key messages
Using social media share buttons on WordPress websites can pose data privacy risks.
The MashShare plugin offers a safer alternative by opening new windows to Facebook or Twitter when users click share buttons.
This approach minimizes the website operator's liability and potentially avoids transferring user data.
My name is Klaus Meffert. I have a doctorate in computer science and have been working professionally and practically with information technology for over 30 years. I also work as an expert in IT & data protection. I achieve my results by looking at technology and law. This seems absolutely essential to me when it comes to digital data protection. My company, IT Logic GmbH, also offers consulting and development of optimized and secure AI solutions.
