Facebook is the latest tech giant to receive a fining from European privacy officials, with the social media network today handed a $166,000 penalty by France’s Commission Nationale de l’informatique (CNIL).
The fine was issued in response to an investigation made into changes that Facebook made to its terms and conditions in 2014.
At that time, the company launched its Privacy Basics initiative to address ongoing criticism about the vagueness of its rules and make more clear what content could and couldn’t be viewed by other users.
However, according to several European data agencies, these changes also imposed new rules that allowed Facebook to combine users’ data in new ways and to track them via cookies that violated existing privacy legislation.
For example, that the social media network failed to make it clear that it would continue to gather information on users even when they visited third-party sites
As a result, an order was issued in January 2016 requiring Facebook to modify its terms regarding combining user data and tracking users. However, CNIL decided in March that the company had failed to make a sufficient response and began to proceed with the fine.
This might only be the first such fine Facebook will be hit with over the matter, with Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain also said to be undertaking similar investigations.
