Companies that embed Facebook’s “Like” button on their websites must seek users’ consent to transfer their personal data to the U.S. social network, in line with the bloc’s data privacy laws, Europe’s top court said on Monday.
According to the European Court of Justice ruling, a site that embeds the Facebook “like” icon and link on its pages also sends user data to the US web giant.
Hopefully this will lead to the systematic removal of Facebook buttons from websites that serve the EU. Facebook’s buttons are trackers, and should be treated as such.
Choice quote:
> Bitkom, a German trade federation for online businesses criticised the ruling, saying it would heap costly bureaucracy on firms without enhancing consumer protection.
is patently false. Either facebook stopping with tracking or removing that button prevents all that “bureaucracy” and enhances consumer protection at the same time.
I am thinking that they did not have the removal of Facebook from their site in mind when they made this statement.
Nothing will change as a result of this. All that will happen is the site owners will add a line to their privacy/cookie policy.
The user will blindly agree to that little bar at the top of the page, and the data is sent off to America
Yeah, the “cookie law” is one big fat joke. It just means you either have to agree or go to a different web page. It in no way encourages informed choice and the user still has no idea, generally speaking, of what they’re agreeing to. I’ve seen sites where you had to accept the cookies before you could actually read the terms of service at all.
I don’t think that can work.
The problem is that to embed the “like” button in a page the page has to include javascript from Facebook that’s executed before any cookie is checked; and even a simple image tag (with the image on a Facebook server) without any scripting is enough to let Facebook know who (client IP address) was looking at which page
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer ).