For the second time in a week Facebook has experienced and outage.
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Facebook has confirmed that it will temporarily comply with an order from a Belgian court to stop tracking people who don’t have accounts on the free content ad network.
According to a report by Reuters, additional security steps were also added by Facebook.
“As if we are the ones blocking information from the internet user”, he said, adding Facebook’s actions amount to “blackmail”.
With Facebook now having imposed the “log in” condition for Belgian Facebook users for viewing any content, the company will no longer track the browsers of Facebook pages in Belgium for people who are not signed into a Facebook account.
Facebook now expects to receive an order this week (which it will appeal), but in the meantime it said that the datr cookies will not be set for non-users. Facebook restricted access to its site instead of getting rid of a tracking cookie, which can thrive in the Facebook user’s browser for up to a couple of years. The move follows a court ruling that bans the installation of cookies on logged out browsers.
In November a court in Brussels upheld a claim brought by the Belgian Privacy Commission that found Facebook was violating personal data protection laws by using cookies to track internet users without a Facebook account. Facebook claims that by using the security cookie it protected Belgian people from more than 33,000 takeover attempts in the past month. The only option left now is for Belgian users to create an account on Facebook in order to access its services. Last month, the social network giant was ordered to stop tracking such users or they could be fined daily.
Customers who can’t find a business’s website are more likely to search for the Facebook page instead. “Period. It seems like they are playing a game in which they are trying to corner us”.
Taking away the cookie “will cause a marginal privacy hit”, reports the platform’s Alex Stamos.
Paul Bernal of the University of East Anglia believes that the ruling will not be limited to Belgium as it is a European law. But the big European ruling started as a complaint from an Austrian privacy activist lodged with Ireland’s data-protection authority in 2013.
Belgium’s knowledge safety regulator took the United States firm to courtroom in June, accusing it of trampling on European Union privacy regulation by monitoring individuals and not using a Facebook account with out their consent.
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The Register sought comment from Belgium’s privacy watchdog.
