Privacy

Facebook “tramples” on European privacy law by tracking people without consent, Belgium’s privacy watchdog has said. The country’s Privacy Protection Commission accused Facebook of dodging questions from European regulators.

In the hours before US senators voted to take on the might of the National Security Agency this week, their inboxes were deluged with more than 2,200 supportive emails from a most unlikely group of revolutionaries: America’s librarians.

Facebook’s terms of service are pretty clear, by the standards of such things. (I should know: I once read 150,000 words of small print in a week to see what I would find out.) There are very few random blocks of all-caps, it’s fairly short, and it has hyperlinks in it. You don’t even have to scroll down to find one of the key sections, which lays out what it means when you share information with Facebook.

The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 officially became law on Tuesday, after being passed by the House of Lords last month. Often referred to as the Snooper’s Charter, the legislation has been a year in the making and offers unprecedented new powers to police and spy agencies in the UK for keeping tabs on British citizens.

Smaller European Union companies may not recognize their obligation under the new EU privacy regime to appoint data protection officers and may find that finding qualified officers is becoming difficult, privacy analysts told Bloomberg BNA Nov. 15

Governments and companies are sharing an unprecedented amount of information, cross-correlating everything from user viewing habits to purchases, to where people are located during the day, to where they sleep at night and with whom they associate.

For some time now, conventional wisdom has claimed that young people don’t care about privacy. As it happens, that conventional wisdom had always been, at best, an oversimplification. By now, it is simply wrong.

You can tell a lot about a person from how they react to something. That’s why Facebook’s various “Like” buttons are so powerful. Clicking a reaction icon isn’t just a way to register an emotional response, it’s also a way for Facebook to refine its sense of who you are.