The Applicant also did not prove his claim of general conduct according to which the collection was done without obtaining the consent of non-Facebook users. No evidence was presented regarding third-party websites that transfer materials without obtaining the consent of the group members as required by law.
In these circumstances, in the absence of an evidentiary basis as required for the claim in this context, I am of the opinion that there is no reason to address the Applicant's argument that even if a third-party website undertook to the Respondent to obtain consent as required, this does not absolve the Respondent of legal liability in situations in which consent was not obtained as required. This is because, in light of the above, this is a theoretical issue, with regard to this application for approval.
- Moreover, the witness on behalf of the Respondent testified that Facebook does not process information that third-party websites send to Facebook, which enables the personal identification of non-users (at pp. 171-173 of the transcript):
"The website, in a non-registered user case, the website will send a Pixel file or a Pixel event to Facebook, but it does not match an account based off of the cookie value. So it’s not processed for advertising purposes, it’s not associated to a particular individual, there’s no notion of an account or a person, so it’s just an arbitrary website visit, or data about an arbitrary website visit, and it’s processed for the limited purposes that I outlined in my affidavit. So site security, integrity, technical protection of our web services. But it’s not, to emphasize, it’s not associated to a person or an individual, because we don’t have that information."
"In the hypothetical example that someone is visiting a shopping website, a non-registered user is visiting a shopping website, Facebook would receive that whatever event the website owner has set up through Pixel to track […] that there was a purchase, but it would not be associated to an individual, a person, anything that represents."