Facebook loses Belgian privacy case, faces fine of up to $125 million
A Belgian court threatened Facebook on Friday with a fine of up to 100 million euros ($125 million) if it continued to break privacy laws by tracking people on third-party websites.
In a case brought by Belgium's privacy watchdog, the court also ruled that Facebook had to delete all data it had gathered illegally on Belgian citizens, including people who were not Facebook users themselves.
Facebook, which will be fined 250,000 euros a day or up to 100 million euros if it does not comply with the court's judgment, said in a statement it would appeal the ruling.
Also at The Guardian.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday February 18 2018, @09:29PM (1 child)
I did some work on a tool that visualized all the mentions of Pfizer products on facebook
Contributing to that made me feel I was in league with Satan. I resolved never to do anything like that again
You can prevent a great deal of tracking by blackholing web bug servers in /etc/hosts. Alternatively you can blackhole them with your router
Just one such server will get you a long ways towards where you want to be:
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @06:42AM
Using a hosts file is a good idea but it's still a blacklist. A whitelist is much more powerful.
One handy whitelist for your browser is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/ [mozilla.org]
But then hosts blocks all apps, not just browser.