The public believes (in general) that tech giants like Google and Facebook shouldn't have the ability to track them without their consent. The problem is that these tech companies are so huge, it's hard not to end up in their system.
This is quite apparent in Belgium, where a report from the Belgian Privacy Commission is claiming that Facebook is tracking non-users without their consent. The report claims that a recent update in the company's data use policy made it so that "Facebook's tracking methods and contract terms violated European law, while its opt-out mechanism for behavioural advertising didn't allow users to provide legally valid consent," ZDNet reported.
When Facebook first heard word of the report, it claimed that it was full of "factual inaccuracies" and that the researchers did not contact the company to work together to fix things or to make sure its data was accurate. However, Facebook didn't release a list of those factual inaccuracies until April 9.
Facebook's vice president of policy for Europe Richard Allan wrote a blog post on Thursday claiming that "The report gets it wrong multiple times in asserting how Facebook uses information to provide our service to more than a billion people around the world...."
For example, the Belgian report claims that Facebook uses its third-party-based-like system to track every user on the Internet, not just Facebook users. Allan says that this practice is just a "bug", and that "Our practice is not to place cookies on the browsers of people who have visited sites with Social Plugins but who have never visited Facebook.com to sign up for an account.....The authors identified a few instances when cookies may have been placed, and we began to address those inadvertent cases as soon as they were brought to our attention."
Allan emphasized in the post that users and non-users alike have the ability to opt out of Facebook's data tracking system.
"If someone opts out, we no longer use information about the websites and apps that person uses off Facebook to target ads to them," he said.
"People can opt out of seeing ads on Facebook that are based on the websites and apps they use off Facebook through the industry-standard Digital Advertising Alliance opt out, the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance opt out or the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada opt out. Here, they can opt out of these ads from Facebook and from more than a hundred other companies. People can also opt out using their phone settings."