Facebook To Appeal Belgian Court Order Stopping It From Tracking Non-Users
Facebook said it will appeal a ruling by a Belgian court ordering it to stop tracking via social plugins the online activities of non-users there, or face a daily fine of $269,000. The court gave Facebook 48 hours to comply…
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with Monday's ruling. The court said Facebook uses a special cookie called “datr” with a two-year life, which the company said it uses to distinguish legitimate visits from illegitimate uses. "We've used the datr security cookie for more than five years to keep Facebook secure for 1.5 billion people around the world. We will appeal this decision and are working to minimize any disruption to people's access to Facebook in Belgium,” a company spokeswoman emailed Tuesday. The court sided with Belgium's data protection authority (DPA), which filed a civil suit in June against the company. In May, the DPA said the datr cookie allows Facebook to track the surfing behaviors of non-users outside of its social networking site. The DPA said "Facebook's argument that in certain cases there is no tracking because the data collected are anonymized or destroyed after some time, is therefore irrelevant here, since initially -- purely by collecting cookies and website data through plug-ins -- personal data were processed." The DPA recommended Facebook provide full transparency about the use of cookies, stop placing unique identifier cookies with non-users and refrain from collecting and using data from users without their "unambiguous and specific consent through an opt-in" service. The Belgium DPA didn't comment on the ruling. In an Oct. 13 blog post, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said that if the company is prevented from using the datr cookie, it would have to treat any visit from Belgium "as an untrusted login and deploy a range of other verification methods for people to prove that they are the legitimate owners of their accounts."