Facebook Spits On Privacy, What A Surprise.

Facebook, as a company, has never been known for its overwhelming courtesy in the way of user privacy. This is, in some ways, considerably surprising due to the cultural shift towards a privacy-focus of technology and it's producers. Companies like Mozilla who make their encrypted email service, Thunderbird, and their privacy-inclined internet browser, Firefox.

However, a new revelation has uncovered Facebook's privacy-dismissal is much more significant than a simple case of opting on or out of data collection. Not only is Facebook mindlessly collecting mass amounts of data on their users, but they collect the data of every individual who visits their page even if they do not have an account or if the user has explicitly opted out of Facebook's data collection service.

This action is particularly important as it doubtlessly violates European Union law.

The issue at hand revolves around Facebook's external plug-ins such as the "Like" button which is in place in over thirteen million sites. They also place tracking cookies onto any individual's computer if they visit any of the facebook.com domains, including those which do not require an account to use.

So, what all this means is if a user visits a page with one of these "Like" plug-ins or any Facebook plug-in their data is collected and sent to Facebook for tracking even if the person does not interact with the plug-in in question.

According to EU law;

"EU privacy law states that prior consent must be given before issuing a cookie or performing tracking, unless it is necessary for either the networking required to connect to the service (“criterion A”) or to deliver a service specifically requested by the user (“criterion B”). The same law requires websites to notify users on their first visit to a site that it uses cookies, requesting consent to do so."

It would be an understatement to say that this sort of behavior from Facebook is mildly repulsive. In the end, they squeeze their way in and out of privacy-law loopholes in order to do nothing more than make their advertisements more direct to an audience.

That's all I have to say today, but I'll be back tomorrow.

"All war is deception." -Sun Tzu