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Belgian watchdog claims Facebook disobeys data-protection laws

Monday 18 May 2015 00:20 CET | News

Belgian Privacy Protection Commission has accused Facebook of not complying with the European data-protection laws.

The Privacy Protection Commission alleges that Facebook has avoided questions from national regulators about how it collected data and that the social networking giant did not recognize the Belgian and other EU national jurisdictions and claimed to adhere only to the laws in Ireland, the site of its European headquarters.

According to a study commissioned by the Belgian Privacy Commission (BPC), the social networking giant tracks web movements of all the visitors to its website without their consent, whether or not they are logged in to Facebook or are not the registered users of the site or have opted out, through use of social plugins, primarily the ‘Like’ button.

As per the study report, Facebook places tracking cookies on users’ computers if they visit any page on the facebook.com domain, including fan pages or other pages that do not require a Facebook account to visit. As a result when a user visits a third-party website that carries one of Facebook’s social plug-ins, it detects and sends the tracking cookies back to Facebook.


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Keywords: data protection, online security, web fraud, online authentication, digital identity, Facebook, Belgium
Categories: Fraud & Financial Crime
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Countries: World
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Fraud & Financial Crime






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