31 March 2015 – Having just come back from the Max Schrems case in Luxembourg (which was admirably covered by our eTERA Europe colleague, Gregory Bufithis) we were awash in the claims of Facebook committing multiple breaches of European data protection laws. Much of it was due to the infamous Facebook “Like” button which collects details about users’ browsing habits.
So today’s story in The Guardian comes as no surprise:
Facebook tracks the web browsing of everyone who visits a page on its site even if the user does not have an account or has explicitly opted out of tracking in the EU, extensive research commissioned by the Belgian data protection agency has revealed.
The report, from researchers at the Centre of Interdisciplinary Law and ICT (ICRI) and the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography department (Cosic) at the University of Leuven, and the media, information and telecommunication department (Smit) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels, was commissioned after an original draft report revealed Facebook’s privacy policy breaches European law.
The researchers now claim that Facebook tracks computers of users without their consent, whether they are logged in to Facebook or not, and even if they are not registered users of the site or explicitly opt out in Europe. Facebook tracks users in order to target advertising.
For the full article click here.
