Quote:A recent report released by the independent Belgian Privacy Commission alleged that Facebook integration with a large number of websites had allowed the social media giant to track both users and non users as they browsed around the web. A Facebook corporate blog post has responded to those accusations directly by claiming the most egregious behavior discovered was a bug in their social media plugin.

Facebook has directly countered a number of the researcher's allegations regarding the opting out of ads, saying that users are indeed free to opt out of social ads and that the opt out carries across all devices. They also counter the argument that Facebook is not clear about how their advertising works with links to both descriptions of how their ads work and European audits of those practices.

The most serious allegation the researchers made was that Facebook was adding cookies to the computers of people without Facebook accounts, assigning them a unique advertising ID and collecting information about their habits. This turns out to be true, as Facebook as basically admitting as such with the caveat that it was a bug in their social plugin.