Facebook named privacy villain of the year

The Belgian Big Brother Awards 2016 yesterday unanimously granted the title of 'ultimate privacy villain of the year' to Facebook, as decided by the public and a professional jury.

"We nominated Facebook for the award because their default settings are noxious for privacy," explained Joe McNamee, Executive Director of European Digital Rights. He later remarked, "Facebook is a multi-billion dollar company that has one commodity - you!"

Digital rights and freedoms association EDRi describes Facebook as having "access to a wide range of personal data, and it tracks your movements across the web, whether you are logged in or not."

The Big Brother Awards were created by UK privacy rights charity Privacy International -- which is associated with EDRi -- and are intended to highlight privacy violations.