Belgian court orders Facebook to stop collecting users' data
Brussels: A Belgian court has ordered Facebook to stop collecting data of users or face a daily penalty of 250,000 euros. The court found the social media site guilty of breaching Belgium's privacy laws.
According to the ruling: "Facebook informs us insufficiently about gathering information about us, the kind of data it collects, what it does with that data and how long it stores it. It also does not gain our consent to collect and store all this information."
The social media sites follow its user's activities using so-called "social-plug ins," "cookies" and "pixels."
Facebook has been ordered to stop the practice straight away and delete any data that it obtained by means contrary to Belgian privacy laws.
The Belgian Commission for the Protection of Privacy (CPP) had taken Facebook to court.
"We are of course very stratified that the court accepted our argument in full. Facebook is currently running a big campaign stressing the importance of privacy. Let's hope that they now put their words into practice," Willem Debeuckelaere, Head of CPP, told VRT News.
Facebook said it would appeal against the verdict.
"We are disappointed with today's verdict. Over the past few years we have worked hard to help people understand how we use cookies to show relevant content and to make Facebook secure," the company said in a statement.
The European Commission (EC) has also warned Facebook and Twitter of action including enforcement measures if they fail to reform their terms of services to fully comply with the European Union's (EU) consumer rules.
It has found Facebook and Twitter wanting in aligning their terms of services with EU consumer protection rules.
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MP: 7-year-old girl raped and murdered; minor relative detained
Barwani (MP), Jan 28 (PTI) Police on Wednesday detained a 17-year-old relative of a seven-year-old girl in Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh for allegedly raping her and killing her by throwing her into a canal, a police official said.
Superintendent of Police Jagdish Dawar told reporters that the body of the child was recovered from the Indira Sagar Canal on January 26, following information from residents of a village in the Rajpur police station area of the district.
He said the post-mortem report concluded severe injuries to the girl’s private parts and attributed her death to drowning.
Dawar said a 17-year-old boy, a close relative of the girl, has been detained in connection with the rape-murder.
The teenager told the police that he kidnapped the girl from her home on the night of January 25 while her family members were asleep, took her to a nearby canal and raped her, according to the official.
When the girl started screaming during the sexual assault, the minor boy allegedly threw her into the canal, with the intention of killing her. The child drowned in the water body, the official said.
The detained minor will be produced in a juvenile court.
A case has been registered under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and an investigation is underway, he added.
