Social Media giant Facebook is being sued by the AEPD, the Spanish data Protection Agency over privacy infringements in Spain. Facebook is charged with breaching laws designed to protect people’s information and confidentiality.
Social Media giant Facebook is being sued by the AEPD, the Spanish data Protection Agency over privacy infringements in Spain. Facebook is charged with breaching laws designed to protect people’s information and confidentiality.
According to the AEPD, the social network collects its users’ personal data without their consent and makes profit by sharing sensitive data with advertisers and marketers. It receives data regarding user’s ideology, religious beliefs, personal tastes and navigation directly or through third party sources without informing users on how the information would be used.
The company has been fined € 600,000 after authorities found that the activity constituted serious infringements of Spain’s Local Data Protection Law. The company was fined € 300,000 each for violations including tracking people through the use of ‘Like’ button social plug-ins inserted in non-Facebook web pages and failing to delete data collected from users after using it.
The AEPD(Agencia Españtola de Protección de Datos)alleged that Facebook does not collect consent of users and contains ‘generic and unclear terms’ constituting serious infringements.
Facebook has denied all allegations and intends to appeal the decision of AEPD quoting the statement:-
"We take note of the DPA's decision with which we respectfully disagree.Whilst we value the opportunities we've had to engage with the DPA to reinforce how seriously. we take the privacy of people who use Facebook, we intend to appeal this decision." "As we made clear to the DPA, users choose which information they want to add to their profile and share with others, such as their religion. However, we do not use this information to target adverts to people."Recently, Facebook was fined €150,000 for the way they targeted adverts and tracked users. Recently, European Antitrust Officials fined Tech Giant Google € 2.42 Billion for manipulating search results since 2008.