Facebook On Tracking Accusations: Report Gets It "Wrong Multiple Times"

Late last month, Facebook was accused of tracking users and non-users alike, and as such was said to be in violation of European law. The information came from a study commissioned by the Belgian Privacy Commission, and earlier this week Facebook fired back at the accusations, saying the report was wrong in more than one way. The social network posted a long statement by the company's Vice President of Policy in Europe, Richard Allan, who tackled each claim individually.

Said Allan, Facebook engineers and privacy experts have spent the last week looking over the commissioned report's claims, and that it has ultimately found that it was wrong multiple times when talking about how the social networks "uses information to provide" its service.

He points toward the claim that Facebook uses cookies to track people across the Web, saying that the social network is in fact "transparent" about how it uses cookies and that it discloses that they're being used. He also says that Facebook honors a request to opt-out of targeted advertisement tracking, and there is indeed a way to opt out of them, contradicting the report.

Furthermore, Facebook says it honors opt-out requests across all devices someone uses. Interesting enough, the issue of tracking people who don't use Facebook via the Social Plugins has apparently proven to be true, but Facebook says it was "a bug that may have sent cookies to some people when they weren't on Facebook." The social network says it is working on a fix.

SOURCE: Facebook