Facebook Accused of Breaching EU Privacy Law

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At F8 in 2014, CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed putting people first when it came to privacy was one of Facebooks main priorities

Facebook breaches EU law by tracking the web browsing of all visitors to its site, even if they dont have an account or have actively opted out of tracking, according to research commissioned by the Belgian Privacy Commission and shared with The Guardian.

The report alleges that Facebook uses cookies to track visitors to any Facebook.com domain, including public pages that do not require the user to be logged in – and even to the 13m external sites which integrate Facebooks social plug-ins such as the Like button or Facebook log-in, whether they interact with these plug-ins or not.

According to Facebooks policy, the cookies are used to “enable us to deliver, select, evaluate, measure and understand the ads we serve on and off Facebook”, but the report holds that this behaviour fails to uphold EU privacy law stating that users must give prior consent before they can be tracked or have a cookie issued to their computer.

A spokesperson for Facebook denied the reports claims, telling The Guardian it “contains factual inaccuracies”.