Facebook and Google are pushing users to share private information by offering "invasive" and limited default options despite new EU data protection laws aimed at giving users more control and choice, a government study declared yesterday.

The Norwegian Consumer Council found that the U.S. tech giants' privacy updates clash with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which forces companies to clarify what choices people have when sharing private information. The case for new laws has been boosted by the recent scandal over the harvesting of Facebook users' data by British consultancy Cambridge Analytica for the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Information for the report was collected from mid-April to early June, a few weeks after the EU rules came into force. The report exposed that Facebook and Google often set the least privacy-friendly option as a default and that users rarely change pre-selected settings.