Facebook is known to be under threat from European allegations over its role in US surveillance. The largest social network this week took another hit when a Belgian privacy report said it was violating European laws.
After that, the company publicly admitted for the first time that it had collected data from users who were not registered with Facebook through websites that had a Like button embedded (and which ones didn't). But the greedy social network says that the collection of this data occurred due to a bug.
The company this week responded to the final report prepared for it by the Belgian Data Protection Commission, which examined an update Facebook to its data usage policy last year.
The report from Belgium claims that Facebook's tracking methods violate the terms of European contract law. The report also states that there is no opt-out mechanism that stops behavioral advertising and allows users to give their legally valid consent.
Facebook initially responded by saying that the report contained "inaccuracies" and that the researchers never contacted them to discuss these claims.
“The report incorrectly claims multiple times that Facebook uses information from providing our services to more than a billion people around the world,” Facebook’s vice president of policy for Europe, Richard Allan, told the social network this week.
One of the most controversial claims in the report is that Facebook is using the Like button embedded on third-party websites to track everyone online, even those who aren't registered with the social network. According to the report, this is done with a special cookie called "datr" that is served to non-users.
According to Facebook, what the report's researchers discovered was actually a bug.
“Our practice is not to place cookies in the browsers of people who have visited websites with Social Plugins, but who have never visited Facebook.com,” Allan said
"Researchers identified a few instances where cookies were being served, but we had begun addressing these unintended cases as soon as they came to our attention."
The conclusions are yours...
