Belgium orders Facebook to stop tracking users

If it fails to comply, it will have to pay fines of up to £175,000 a day to the Belgian Privacy Commission. “We will appeal this decision and are working to minimise any disruption to people’s access to Facebook in Belgium”. But it wasn’t a conscious move, the company said, blaming a “bug” that was quickly fixed.

The newspaper said the court order could create a precedent for other European privacy watchdogs to take the same action.

Facebook has landed a few trouble with the Belgian privacy commission for tracking its users’ browsing habits and those that don’t even use the social network.

He who rose up from the ranks of Facebook’s privacy-ravaged users to against what he said was Facebook’s illegal data collection/retention, and is now witnessing the fruits of his labor.

In response, the company said that it had used cookies for more than five years without facing privacy complaints, and that it would now take its case to the Belgian Court of Appeal.

“Facebook cannot follow people on the Internet who are not members of Facebook which is very logical because they cannot have given permission to follow them”, Tommelein said in an emailed statement. Roughly 80 percent of Facebook’s 1.4 billion users outside North America are managed through its Irish base.

At specific issue in this court case: how Facebook deploys tracking cookies and social plug-ins on third party websites to track the Internet activity of users and non-Facebook users.

The cookie stayed on the device for up to two years and allowed Facebook to consult it whenever the user paid further visits to Facebook pages, or to any page where they could like or recommend via a Facebook link.

The European Court of Justice ruled recently that people’s digital information, including search histories and social media posts, can no longer be transferred to the United States under previous European Safe Harbor laws.

On this point it’s worth noting the Brussels’ court ruling aligns with recent landmark rulings by Europe’s top court, the ECJ, also relating to jurisdiction and data protection – including the so-called right to be forgotten ruling involving Google Spain, and a more recent judgement where the ECJ ruled that the Hungarian data protection authority is able to impose data protection-related fines on a Slovakian website which was offering services in Hungary – because it judged the latter to have a few establishment in the country.