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“The Belgian data protection authority has told Facebook to stop tracking users who logout or those that have never registered for the social network.”

The Belgian privacy commission has told Facebook to stop tracking the internet activities of people who have not registered with the site or have logged out, after a “staggering” report showed alleged breaches of EU privacy law.

“Facebook tramples on European and Belgian privacy laws”, the data protection authority said in a statement. “Facebook has shown itself particularly miserly in giving precise answers,” it continued, adding that the results of its investigation were “disconcerting” and that it would take legal action if its recommendations were not followed.

Willem Debeuckelaere, president of the Belgian privacy commission, said that the way Facebook is treating its users’ private lives “without respect needs tackling”, and that “it’s make or break time.”

According to a report commissioned by the Belgian data protection agency Facebook has been tracking users on a long-term basis who visit any page — be it a fan page, profile or any other portion of the site that does not require a Facebook account to visit — belonging to the Facebook.com domain.

The opinion published on Friday noted that because Facebook has the power to link internet users’ browsing habits to their real identity, social network interactions and sensitive data including medical information, religious, sexual and political preferences, it is in a unique position compared to most of the other cases of so-called “third-party tracking”.

[Source: The Guardian]

Via BoingBoing.

From the Technology blog at guardian.co.uk:

There are some clues left in the hacking of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook fan page on Wikipedia -– but what do they add up to?

A quick whois query tells you that it is… the US department of defence in Williamsburg.

In other words: this might be someone in the military. Most likely those edits don’t come from one person –- they come from all sorts of people in the Williamsburg location. Or, just as possible, it was someone who had hacked into the computers there from outside (not as difficult as you’d hope it would be) and is using them as a proxy to make the Wikipedia edit, and, quite possibly, hack Zuckerberg’s page.

(Update: Facebook tells us that “A bug enabled status postings by unauthorised people on a handful of Pages. The bug has been fixed.”)

— Charles Arthur @ guardian.co.uk

“A researcher from a Dutch university is warning that Facebook’s ‘Like This’ button is watching your every move. Arnold Roosendaal, who is a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg University for Law, Technology and Society, warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not. Roosendaal says that Facebook’s tentacles reach way beyond the confines of its own web sites and subscriber base because more and more third party sites are using the ‘Like This’ button and Facebook Connect.”

— Slashdot