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Facebook ordered to stop collecting user data by Belgian
court
Social network instructed to delete illegally collected data or face €100m in
fines after it loses case over consent and tracking
Facebook has been ordered by a Belgian court to stop collecting data on users or
face daily fines of €250,000 a day, or up to €100m.
The court ruled on Friday that Facebook had broken privacy laws by tracking
people on third-party sites in the latest salvo in a long-running battle between
the Belgian commission for the protection of privacy (CPP) and the social
network.
“Facebook informs us insufficiently about gathering information about us, the
kind of data it collects, what it does with that data and how long it stores
it,” the court said. “It also does not gain our consent to collect and store all
this information.”
Facebook has also been ordered to delete all data it had gathered illegally on
Belgian citizens, including people who were not users of the social network.
The social media firm uses different methods to track the online behaviour of
people if they are not on the company’s web site by placing cookies and
invisible pixels on third party web sites, the court said.
Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy for EMEA, said the
company was disappointed with the verdict and intended to appeal: “The cookies
and pixels we use are industry standard technologies and enable hundreds of
thousands of businesses to grow their businesses and reach customers across the
EU.
“We require any business that uses our technologies to provide clear notice to
end-users, and we give people the right to opt-out of having data collected on
sites and apps off Facebook being used for ads.”
Belgium v Facebook
The battle between Belgium and Facebook has been running since 2015, when the
CPP commissioned a report by researchers from the University of Leuven, which
found that Facebook’s tracking of all visitors without explicit consent using
cookies breached EU law. The CPP, which does not have powers to directly
penalise companies, took Facebook to court later that year for its alleged
“trampling” over Belgian and EU privacy law after failing to come to an
agreement with the social network following the report’s findings.
The Belgian court ordered Facebook to stop tracking non-members at the end of
2015, threatening fines. Facebook appealed against the court’s ruling at the
start of 2016, disputing that Belgium had jurisdiction over the social network
as its European operations were headquartered in Dublin. Facebook also disputed
the use of English in the ruling including the words “browser” and “cookie”,
which the social network said was against Belgian law that stipulates only
Dutch, French or German may be used.
Facebook then won on appeal, overturning the decision that blocked it from using
its so-called “datr cookies” to track the internet activity of logged-out users
in Belgium. That appeal has now been overturned, with the court backing the
findings of the CPP.
This is just one of many battles Facebook is fighting in Europe as the political
winds have turned against the big US technology firms. The EU and European
nations continually criticise Facebook for failing to do enough to tackle the
rise of take news and to deal with extremist content.
Its WhatsApp messenger is also facing a task force from the European data
regulator, the Article 29 Working Party, over its failure to adequately address
concerns about getting user consent to share data with Facebook. The social
network’s default privacy settings and use of personal data were recently ruled
illegal by a Berlin court in Germany. France has also ordered the company to
stop its sharing of WhatsApp user data, while Facebook was fined £94m by the EU
for providing “misleading” information in its takeover of WhatsApp.
This is all on the eve of the introduction of tough new European data privacy
rules, called the General Data Protection Regulation, which come into force on
25 May. Allan said: “We are preparing for the new General Data Protection
Regulation with our lead regulator the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. We’ll
comply with this new law, just as we’ve complied with existing data protection
law in Europe.”