Revealed: gambling firms secretly sharing users’ data with Facebook without permission

Meta accounts of those affected flooded with ads for casinos and betting sites

We didn’t click ‘consent’ on any gambling website. So how did Facebook know where we’d been?

Gambling companies are covertly tracking visitors to their websites and sending their data to Facebook’s parent company without consent in an apparent breach of data protection laws.

The information is then being used by Facebook’s owner, Meta, to profile people as gamblers and flood them with ads for casinos and betting sites, the Observer can reveal. A hidden tracking tool embedded in dozens of UK gambling websites has been extracting visitors’ data – including details of the webpages they view and the buttons they click – and sharing it with the social media company.

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