French Gov't Gives Facebook 3 Months To Stop Tracking Non-User Browsers

Reader iamthecheese writes RT reports that France's National Commission of Information and Freedoms found Facebook tracking of non-user browsers to be illegal. Facebook has three months to stop doing it. The ruling points to violations of members and non-members privacy in violation of an earlier ruling. The guidance, published last October, invalidates safe harbor provisions. If Facebook fails to comply the French authority will appoint someone to decide upon a sanction. Related: A copy of the TPP leaked last year no longer requires signing countries to have a safe harbor provision.

Comments

Okay, I'll ask.

[BitterOak]

I guess I'll ask the obvious question. What is a "non-user browser"? Is it a browser operated by a robot or something? All the browsers I've used have been meant to be operated by a user. That's kind of the definition of a browser. There are programs like curl and wget which can fetch pages automatically, so is that what they mean by a non-user browser?