Facebook Accused of Spying on Belgian Users

The Belgian privacy commission (BPC) accused Facebook of acting like the NSA by spying on European users. The Belgian data protection body referred to Snowden’s revelations about surreptitious mass surveillance by the spy agency.

Its is official that the agency launched a lawsuit against the social networking site after accusing it of violating Belgian and European privacy law. The BPC accused Facebook of a number of breaches, including the tracking of non-users and logged-out Facebook users for advertising purposes, and is currently threatening the company with fine of €250,000 per day if it doesn’t stop which is equal to -

250000 Euro equals = 279862.50 US Dollar

In respond to this incident, Facebook has repeatedly denied the all claims, explaining that the data and conclusions of the Belgian agency are false. The company is going to demonstrate to the court how its technology protects people from spam, malware, and other attacks. Facebook also insists that its practices are consistent with European law and with the rules of the most popular Belgian online services.

The social network facebook also explained that its European operations and practices are governed by the Irish data protection agency, because its EU headquarters are located in Dublin. In the meantime, the case is being watched by the rest of the countries in the region, where data protection regulators also started to question Facebook’s privacy practices throughly.

Facebook announced immediately that the company has repeatedly offered to help resolve the Belgian agency’s concerns, but the BPC(Belgian privacy commission) instead took the tech giant to court and seems to be trying to stop Facebook from using security technology because they misunderstand it.

The Belgian commission believes that Facebook is treating users’ private lives “without respect”, while Facebook offers to discuss these issues directly with Belgian Data Protection Authority rather than going through unnecessary litigation.


this is the beginning we don't know that where else such spying and pointed surveillance is being conducted.
Lets wait and watch.

What is Surveillance and What it should be!

My main motive for this article is to try to understand that what is surveillance is and what it has become. The surveillance meaning and what it is being actually implied nowadays.

Surveillance is a act of watching over a asset without there permission aiming to fetch the information in form of data. The huge majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet.

You can check the Wikipedia article surveillance for more info.

here is the link

Surveillance is very good fighting against terrorism, Cyber War, cyber terrorism etc etc... but when it comes to the right of spoof free Internet no one else is monitoring your connection then it becomes a human right. I believe every human on planet earth should have equal right of accessing Internet freely without any hesitation that his connection and his access point over the network is being monitored which later on can be aimed to any direction while any investigation done by any Federal Agencies for any other issue.

 Mass surveillance is being done all across the world is devastated it is clear now that most of the Agencies which are working on the ground are not taking user privacy seriously.

When this happened busy people coming out of their own organizations and making the confidential documents public which type thing should be know by all citizens, an act of doing so is called whistle-blowing.

Surveillance policy should be drafted in a way that every Surveillance request must be approved by some kind of jury before implementation.Surveillance without permission is like setting a wild horse free it can hurt somebody.

Example Edward Snowden one of the most famous whistle-blower he uncover the truth about the secret government mass surveillance program called prism.  and several other which were quality user privacy all across the world not only in United States.

Edward Snowden highlighted the key element facts that he disclosed and this segment of Ted Talk.


TED talk of Edward Snowden  here

Director of National Security Agency responded to the Ted Talk of Edward Snowden in this way you can see in this following video

NSA response to the TED talk with Edwards Snowden. here

We need to take back control over the Internet as we speak we cannot let anybody violate our privacy.

Here are things which we can do to fight against this kind of surveillance or Internet monitoring.

1- Every website and web service should implement SSL connection it is kind of Web encryption between the website and the user this connection is secure via public key the SSL is very very hard to break it will take millions of years for a normal computer to decode a message if he tries around 10,000 combinations of keys per second.

2- The second thing we can do we can use of VPN virtual private network for our Internet connection this is a secure tunnel for a secure channel between your computer and the  and the Internet server

This provider encrypted session between server and your system has no one can spoof hijack in between.
checkout torproject.org

3- Keep your operating system up to date for the latest security patch available.

4- Install the advanced antivirus and anti Malware softwares for example-Kaspersky, AVS.
     ( you don't need anti-virus no linux but still might need anti-malware.

5- Do not use torrent website over VPN because that disclose your real IP.

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Note- All the ideas and information is generally available on web, this article about is collection of my own ideas and views and thought about surveillance. I do not represent any party.
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