Facebook faces fight in Europe over new privacy policy

Facebook rolled out a new privacy policy that allows the sharing of data between its various services, such as Instagram and the Atlas ad unit, and the tracking of users across much of the web. At the time, Hamburg’s Data Protection Chief said he was preparing to coordinate with counterparts across Europe to see what might need to be done about this. Now, European Union data protection officials have formed a task force to deal with the matter, on the basis that Facebook’s new policy may well contravene European privacy laws.

Regulators are now examining several aspects of the behavior allowed by Facebook’s new policy: its off-site tracking of users across sites and apps that are connected to Facebook services, its sharing of data with third parties, its use of personal information and images for commercial purposes, and again the general lack of explicit opt-in user consent for much of this. With regulators in Belgium, the Netherlands and now Germany already sniffing around Facebook’s new privacy policy, the company probably has a substantial fight on its hands.