Facebook illegally tracks internet users’ behavior and location even if they don’t have accounts, EU report claims

http://www.naturalnews.com/051486_Facebook_internet_users_location_tracking.html

Just because you don’t use Facebook doesn’t mean the social media giant isn’t secretly tracking your every move online. A shocking new investigative report out of Europe has revealed that even non-users of the mostly Waste-of-Time-Book are having tracking cookies quietly placed on their computers and devices without consent, allowing Mark Zuckerberg et al. to monitor their behavior and location.
Entitled From social media service to advertising network: A critical analysis of Facebook’s Revised Policies and Terms, the paper explains how Facebook’s data collection and tracking protocols are ethically and morally questionable, at best. Facebook’s contract terms, in fact, are so unfair and stacked against users that they blatantly violate European consumer protection law, according to experts.
And opting out of Facebook’s Orwellian data-mining schemes is difficult, if not impossible, warns the paper, as users must first navigate an intricate web of difficult-to-find “opt-out” sections buried deeply within the site, and in multiple locations. In other words, Facebook is going to track and monitor you whether you like it or not, and sell this information to unnamed third parties and other sources.
But the real kicker isn’t so much that this is actively happening to Facebook users — if you sign up for the “free” social media service, you have to expect that the multi-billion-dollar corporation is profiting from your use. It’s that even non-users are having their privacy violated by Facebook, something that the Facebook’s European Public Policy Vice President Richard Allen recently admitted to in a blog post

 The full report is available here:
Law.KULeuven.be.^[PDF]