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Belgian Privacy Watchdog Sues Facebook
An anonymous reader writes: Belgium is taking Facebook to task – and to court – about the company's opaque user-monitoring frameworks. The country's independent Privacy Commission, which is partnered with equivalent institutions in the Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain, failed to obtain information from the social media giant about the extent and nature of its user-analysis network, and has now decided to take action. The commission is particularly interested in the use that Facebook makes of information about users who are not logged in to Facebook, and may not even be members. The ubiquity of Facebook "share" buttons, along with other popular widgets or modules, have extended the company's reach far beyond its own site. The court convenes on the matter this Thursday.
I think people in Europe are not as blinkered and easily duped as the USAians or others. FB is very invasive and not welcome, it is part of the problem and not part of the solution (on privacy and digital rights).
Yea, we Europeans are really super extra great, not like Yankees... it is just that we like our goverments to treat us like babies who can't enter in to an agreement with a business, PLUS, we are stupid enough that we can't even decide what is the law!
Facebook has its European wing in Ireland (EU member), respecting the Irish law, which says it's o.k. for Facebook to operate in this way, but some Belgians (also EU member) say it may not be o.k. - and EU rules say that if Ireland says it's o.k., then it's o.k. for the whole EU! Stupid Yankees, they can't understand our super extra great European ways...
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Dont forget in firefox to set this
privacy.trackingprotection.enabled : true
stops facebook code on webpages
and privacy badger from eff
rgds