Brussels court condemns Facebook for violating Belgian privacy laws

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The Belgian privacy commission sued Facebook for violating Belgian privacy laws. 

Facebook  follows people on its own platform, but also on 3rd party sites via social plug-ins, cookies and "pixels" which are used to track users' behavior on those other sites. They also use them to track people who don't have a Facebook account. Seeing as those people never consented to the tracking, that is a big issue.

 

Today the Brussels "Court of First Instance" completely agreed with the privacy commission and condemned Facebook.  Facebook has been ordered to stop the tracking and delete all illegally obtained data or pay a fine of €250 000 per day up to a € 100 million (125M USD) total. 

Facebook has already declared that they are disappointed and will fight the verdict.

 

Loosely translated from the Dutch article:

Quote

The Court of First Instance in Brussels has condemned Facebook this afternoon because it does not respect privacy in our country. The privacy commission sued the social media site and the court completely followed its reasoning.

According to the court it isn't clear what information Facebook is collecting and what it's doing with that information.  Facebook also doesn't have a valid permission from the courts to track and follow people.  Facebook therefore has to stop tracking us as long as it doesn't follow the Belgian privacy laws.  All the info it acquired illegally must be destroyed.  If Facebook doesn't comply, they'll be fined €250 000 per day of delay.

 

Facebook has declared that they plan to appeal the verdict.  "We are disappointed in today's verdict.  The past years we have worked hard to help people understand how we use cookies to show relevant content and help secure Facebook.  We have assembled teams of people specifically to protect privacy, from engineers to designers.  And we developed tools that give people choices and control"

 

Source (in Dutch, pretty sure there will be English sources soon) : https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2018/02/16/brusselse-rechtbank-veroordeelt-facebook-wegens-schending-privac/

EDIT :

Source 2 : Reuters : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-belgium/facebook-loses-belgian-privacy-case-faces-fine-of-up-to-125-million-idUSKCN1G01LG

Source 3 : CNBC : https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/16/reuters-america-facebook-loses-belgian-privacy-case-faces-fine-up-to-125-mln.html

 

As someone who doesn't want to have anything to do with the kind of tracking that Facebook does, I can only applaud this.  Let's hope other countries can do the same.

Facebook's response sounds like PR nonsense.  People who don't have a Facebook account still get tracked without getting any tools or choices, assuming those tools actually stop the tracking and not just make Facebook hide the tracking from the users to begin with. 

 

This isn't the first time.  Facebook has been reprimanded in Belgian courts in the past for tracking people who are on their site without being logged in to a FB account or without having one.  Facebook responded to that case by blocking all Facebook pages for people in Belgium who aren't logged in.  Curious how they'll solve this one.

[NMS]

Like:)

[ItsMitch]

1 minute ago, Captain Chaos said:

pay a fine of €250.000 per day

That'll get very expensive, very quick

[RollinLower]

i like this, tough i'm almost positive Facebook will somehow get away with this too.

at the end of the article they state that facebook is very disappointed with the verdict, and that they are fighting it. so yeah, let's see who wins?

[mikat]

12 minutes ago, SC2Mitch said:

That'll get very expensive, very quick

that's the point, lighting some fire under their asses

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

3 minutes ago, RollinLower said:

at the end of the article they state that facebook is very disappointed with the verdict, and that they are fighting it.

Ah, yes.  Apparently they updated the article shortly after I posted this thread.  Those comments from the Privacy Commission and Facebook weren't there yet.

 

I'll update the OP.  Tnx!

[captain cactus]

€250.000 is too low. That's what Facebook makes in like 10 minutes. 

 

You fine them €20.000.000 per day or threaten to block their operations via ISP blocking. That will move them. 

[Misanthrope]

Seems low but if they fail to win appeals and that goes on for several years, well it's a not insignificant chunk of change even for Facebook.

 

It's nice to see at least the EU pretends to care about this issues still.

[captain_to_fire]

Since when did Facebook took privacy laws seriously?

[Misanthrope]

7 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

Since when did Facebook took privacy laws seriously?

 

[Ryujin2003]

1 hour ago, SC2Mitch said:

That'll get very expensive, very quick

Yeah, at first  first I thought 250 isn't bad. But then I realized the decimal want for scientific accuracy...

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

4 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

But then I realized the decimal want for scientific accuracy.

Whoops!  Yeah, we use a comma for decimals and a period for thousands over here.  My bad!  It's 250K per day indeed. 

I replaced it with a space, that should solve it.