Facebook has been at the center of many privacy debates over the years – and it seems now they’re the focus of yet another. According to a report conducted by the Belgian Privacy Commission Facebook installs digital tracking cookies whenever a user visits any page on the facebook.com domain – such as fan pages, public photos and videos, and public user profiles. It doesn’t matter if you have a Facebook account, or even if you’re logged into it – this digital cookie will be installed regardless.
Now there’s a few important things to note here. The report is still a draft, and Facebook hasn’t agreed with this report. Facebook stated the following in regards to their use of a tracking cookie:
The purpose of the data cookie is to identify the web browser being used to connect to Facebook independently of the logged in user. This cookie plays a key role in Facebook’s security and site integrity features.
However if it turns out that Facebook is actually tracking everyone – this is a huge violation of the EU privacy laws and there’s already a fair share of EU members who have expressed their outrage at this news. I’ll do my best to keep you posted about this as more information develops.