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

Re:Youtube next?

[EzInKy]

It is their website after all. Facebook tracks people who don't visit their site. Big difference here. We could use a law such as this French one here in the "land of the free".

Re:Why give them 3 months?

[Zocalo]

You are assuming they are only tracking people based on Cookies. That's a rather naive view, I'm afraid. You'd be better to assume that they are using everything they can get their mitts on to try and track and identify people; IP address, which browser, which headers the browser supplies, any OS details they can get... Just installing extensions to protect your privacy can in itself make you more readily identifiable for tracking purposes. Have a play with the EFF's Panopticlick tool and although you need to enable scripting to make it work the results from the fingerprinting should be an eye opener if you've not seen them before.