Facebook, Inc. FB has finally decided to comply with the Belgium court’s ruling. The social media giant has had a tough time with Belgian regulators who were not so pleased with the company’s practice of tracking people (even those who were not Facebook users or not logged in).
Per a recent Reuters report, Facebook will no longer be tracking non-registered users’ data in the region.
The company admitted to tracking data for the past five years by inserting a cookie called ‘Datr' into the browser whenever a person visited the platform. Belgian authorities (or for that matter a number of other European countries) have vehemently opposed this practice as they believed it violated the domestic data protection policies.
Last month, the issue reached the point that Facebook was given an ultimatum of 48 hours by the Belgian courts to discontinue the practice or pay a fine of about $269K a day. Facebook in its defense argued that the step was to safeguard users from notorious hackers.
It seems that Facebook has chosen to comply with the order while it appeals the ruling.
However, the company has made some changes to its platform that might entice people to use Facebook. Belgian users will now no longer be able to view public Facebook pages without logging on to the platform. This implies that users will now have to create their profiles and then share the data. Even registered users who log in from new web browsers will have to undergo a series of security measures.
The concern is that other European countries can also follow in Belgium’s footsteps, which would increase legal costs and hassles for the social network and also make it harder to collect information on users and serve them more targeted ads.
Facebook carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Some other tech stocks worth considering include Marchex, Inc. MCHX, MeetMe, Inc. MEET and Synacor, Inc. SYNC. All three stocks sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).
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