StudiVZ and SchülerVZ usually are described as Germany's answer to community sites like Facebook. In a recent interview (German language) StudiVZ CEO Marcus Riecke tells about his view on personalised advertisement and the recent changes in StudiVZ's terms and conditions.

Riecke sees his company sitting on the fence when conflicts arise between members' privacy and curiosity of prosecutors. Thus he widely changed the VZ's terms and conditions and asked its members to accept these changes or to leave the community in order to keep the directory and the users sober. By accepting the new terms and conditions users actively agree that their data are given to prosecutors if these deliver a warrant. According to Riecke's statement, acceptance is overwhelming and just 10 per cent of all users didn't agree to the new terms.

Based on the ten enquiries by administrative bodies that come in every week (Riecke mentions this number in the interview) where name and address of a user are given to the authorities, this results in a number of more than 500 incidents with possible juridical consequences per year. Issuers of cease and desist notes can find an extensive area of operation, certainly there will be almost always copyright infringements, cases of verbal abuse and the like.

On the other side, scholars and students have to bear personalised advertisement. Because every community member is encouraged to enter as much data as possible in her user profile, advertisers have a walk-over to find the appropriate customers for their products. I wouldn't consider this innovative like Riecke does, but maybe these people still don't know that even the most personalised ads are just annoying.
And I still don't get the idea of these VZ community sites. You're running barely naked, your data is sold to advertisers or given to prosecutors, that means: defenceless, and still there are enough people to accept all this for a little bit of digital love and security. To me, the price for this would be too high. My data's precious.