The Guardian states in its April 1, 2015, issue:
Facebook tracks the web browsing of everyone who visits a page on its site even if the user does not have an account or has explicitly opted out of tracking in the EU, extensive research commissioned by the Belgian data protection agency has revealed.
The report, from researchers at the Centre of Interdisciplinary Law and ICT (ICRI) and the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography department (Cosic) at the University of Leuven, and the media, information and telecommunication department (Smit) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels, was commissioned after an original draft report revealed Facebook’s privacy policy breaches European law.
The researchers now claim that Facebook tracks computers of users without their consent, whether they are logged in to Facebook or not, and even if they are not registered users of the site or explicitly opt out in Europe. Facebook tracks users in order to target advertising. The issue revolves around Facebook’s use of its social plugins such as the “Like” button, which has been placed on more than 13m sites including health and government sites. Facebook places tracking cookies on users’ computers if they visit any page on the facebook.com domain, including fan pages or other pages that do not require a Facebook account to visit.
Privacy law refers to the laws which deal with the regulation of personal information about individuals which can be collected by governments and other public as well as private organizations and its storage and use. Privacy laws are considered in the context of an individual’s privacy rights or reasonable expectation of privacy. As of 2/17/15, more than half of the US House of Representatives have backed a proposed law that aims to end warrantless searches of email inboxes. Congress unites to back law that would curb warrantless email searches. The proposed law, titled the Email Privacy Act 2015, aims to close a loophole introduced in law three decades ago, which allows the government to access and read emails that were opened more than six months earlier without a court’s approval. The proposed law aims to fix the outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which is still in effect despite falling behind the curve of the digital age. In this day and age when most web-based email inboxes offer free and almost unlimited storage, most historical and archived email is not deleted. That means emails that were opened and left on the server — most Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo emails are never deleted — for more than six months can be accessed without a court order or a warrant, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says. Email less than six-months-old still requires a warrant to be accessed. Technology titans, including Apple, Google, and Yahoo have come forward in favor of the proposed law. A number of privacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy & Technology, also support the reform effort.