Spanje geeft Facebook boete voor het tracken van gebruikers zonder hun toestemming

In Spanje heeft de AEPD (de Spaanse versie van onze Privacycommissie) Facebook een boete van 1,2 miljoen euro gegeven. Aanleiding zijn drie concrete gevallen waarbij de multinational data verzamelde zonder gebruikers daarvan op de hoogte te brengen. Dat is nochtans vereist door de Europese privacywetgeving.

The AEPD found multiple issues with how Facebook gathered data on Spanish users. One of the issues was that Facebook collects data on ideology, sex, and religious beliefs, as well as personal tastes and web surfing habits without informing the users about how that data will be used. A second issue was that Facebook wasn’t obtaining specific and informed consent from the users because the data it was offering them about the collection was not sufficiently clear. The company has been tracking both users and non-users of the service through the Like button across the web without informing them about this sort of tracking, nor about what it plans to do with the data. The company has said that the collection is done for advertising purposes before, but some purposes remain secret, according to the Spanish Data Protection Authority. The AEPD said this sort of collection doesn’t comply with the EU’s data protection regulations.

Finally, the AEPD also noticed that Facebook has not been completely purging the data about users who had already deleted their accounts and that Facebook was making use of accounts’ data that have been deleted for more than 17 months. Considering the data that has remained behind is no longer useful for the purpose for which it was collected, the agency considered this another serious infringement of EU privacy laws.

— bron: Tom’s Hardware