Facebook tracks the web browsing of everyone who visits a page on its site even if the user does not have an account or has explicitly opted out of tracking in the EU.

The report was commissioned after an original draft report revealed Facebook’s privacy policy breaches European law. The researchers now claim that Facebook tracks computers of users without their consent, whether they are logged in to Facebook or not, and even if they are not registered users of the site or explicitly opt out in Europe. Facebook tracks users in order to target advertising. Facebook places tracking cookies on users’ computers if they visit any page on the facebook.com domain.

In classical mythology, Aquila is the eagle carrying Jupiter’s thunderbolts skyward. At Facebook, it is the code name for a high-flying drone, indicative of the social networking company’s lofty ambitions.

The V-shaped unmanned vehicle weighs less than a small car, is the centerpiece of Facebook’s plans to connect with the five billion or so people it has yet to reach. Taking to the skies to beam Internet access down from solar-powered drones may seem like a stretch for a tech company that sells ads to make money. Facebook is under pressure to show that it can pursue projects that are more speculative than product.

Virtual reality goggles, drones and data centers are all driving a hiring spree at Facebook that is set to swell its ranks as much as 14 percent in the near term, according to a review of job listings on the company's website.

The Internet social networking company aims to add new employees, the outgrowth of aggressive investments that executives have said will define the coming year. The market for virtual reality headsets is still nascent. But if virtual reality takes off for entertainment, gaming, communications or computing, Facebook could be at the center of the new platform with Oculus. Facebook’s ambitious effort to build its own satellites and drones capable of delivering Internet service.

Ever feel misunderstood by colleagues, friends or even your spouse? Perhaps a computer, with a little help from your social networking profile, will be able to figure you out. New research suggests that a computer model is a better judge of an individual’s personality than those closest to them.

The judgment is based on an analysis of what people “like” on Facebook. Researchers admitted the findings may be considered “creepy” by some but said they could also lead to technological advances, such as helping artificially intelligent machines better understand the emotional needs of their human creators.

Like it or not, the means of communication our children use have changed drastically over the past decade. They are far less eager to call or meet each other, but are constantly available online in social networks.

When it comes to 11 to 14-year-olds, depending on what’s hip in their environment and, to some extent, the local legislation, your son or daughter would want to register a Facebook or Vkontakte account. Yet as a parent, you are the sole bearer of the responsibility over the way your child’s online life goes. The best way to conserve the connection to your kid while he/she starts traveling down the path to the world of the internet is to do something together. 

With Google processing 40,000 search queries a second — or 1.2 trillion a year — it's a safe bet that many of those doing the Googling are kids. Little surprise then that beginning next year the tech giant plans to create specific versions of its most popular products for those 12 and younger.

The most likely candidates are those that are already popular with a broad age group, such as search, YouTube and Chrome. Google would not offer a timetable for the rollout. Google wants to be thoughtful about what we do, giving parents the right tools to oversee their kids' use products. So the better approach is to simply see to it that the tech is used in a better way.

In the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. For years, privacy and security experts worldwide have called on the general public to adopt strong, open-source cryptography to protect our communications.

Many companies offer “secure messaging” products — but are these systems actually secure? The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s secure messaging scorecard made a list of mobile and Internet messaging services that scored well on privacy and security and the services that scored poorly. Let’s focus primarily on the most popular messengers. 

Facebook is secretly working on a new website called “Facebook at Work” to get a foothold in the office that will compete directly with Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn. The Silicon Valley company is developing a new product designed to allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents.

The new site will look very much like Facebook, but will allow users to keep their personal profile with its holiday photos, political rants and silly videos separate from their work identity. Facebook employees have long used the site in their daily work and expanding this to other companies has been discussed internally for some time. 

Facebook wants assurances from the Drug Enforcement Administration that it's not operating any more fake profile pages as part of ongoing investigations.

Facebook's chief security officer said to DEA Administrator that law enforcement agencies need to follow the same rules about being truthful on Facebook as civilian users. Those rules include a ban on lying about who you are. Sullivan in response to a New York woman's federal lawsuit claimed that a DEA agent created a fake online persona using her name and photographs stored on her cellphone. A woman said her pictures were retrieved from her cellphone after she was arrested.

It should come as no surprise that most mobile apps run some sort of analytics on user behavior. But in the case of Facebook, the social network’s Messenger app for iOS apparently tracks quite a bit more than most users likely realize.

iOS forensics and security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski spent Tuesday morning disassembling Facebook Messenger’s iOS binary, at one point declaring via Twitter that “Messenger appears to have more spyware type code in it than I've seen in products intended specifically for enterprise surveillance.” In an email, Zdziarski said that Messenger is logging practically everything a user might do within the app.