Facebook says tracking nonusers was due to ‘a bug’

Even if you've somehow never visited Facebook.com, there's still a chance your browsing habits were collected by the social networking site.

Analysis from the Belgian Privacy Commission calls out Facebook for its use of cookies to track browsers, a practice the commission said can affect anyone in principle since the Facebook.com domain is so widespread throughout the web. The "Like" button, for instance, is present on more than 13 million websites.

Using social plugins to add cookies to the browsers of people who don't use Facebook "is not our practice," the company's European Vice President of Policy Richard Allan said in response to reports that Facebook could be in violation of European law by continuously tracking unwitting people who cannot keep their data private.

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Allan conceded, however, that "the researchers did find a bug that may have sent cookies to some people when they weren't on Facebook."

"This was not our intention," he added. "A fix for this is already underway."