Facebook Inc. has had its share of legal troubles in the European Union in the past for allegedly violating the region’s privacy laws, and now a Belgian court has ruled that the social media giant may be fined €250,000 (roughly $268,000 USD) a day if it does not change the way it tracks non-users who visit its site.

Specifically, Facebook must change its tracking cookie policy, which can be used to monitor non-users’ activities and behaviors even though they are not actually registered or logged in. The Belgian court argued that non-users have not agreed to Facebook’s policies, and therefore should not be tracked by the site.

“The court has ruled that Facebook can not follow people on the Internet who are not members of Facebook, which is very logical,” said Margot Neyskens, a spokeswoman for the Belgian government. “Since they aren’t members, they can never have given permission to follow them.”

The recent court case is the culmination of a decision reached by a Belgian privacy watchdog group earlier this year, which said in a statement that Facebook “tramples on European and Belgian privacy laws.”

Facebook will fight back

Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, Alex Stamos, explained in a blog post last month that the tracking cookies are used for security purposes to “help differentiate legitimate visits to our website from illegitimate ones.”

“If the court blocks us from using the datr cookie in Belgium, we would lose one of our best signals to demonstrate that someone is coming to our site legitimately,” Stamos argued.

Once an official English translation of the ruling has been delivered to Facebook, which is expected to take up to two weeks, the social network will have only 48 hours to comply with the Belgian government’s demands. Meanwhile, Facebook has said that it will appeal the Belgian court’s decision, and the company has previously asserted that because its European headquarters is in Ireland, it should only be held liable for the privacy laws within that country.

“The primary regulation should come from where a company’s headquarters is located,” Richard Allan, the head of Facebook’s European policy team, said earlier this year. “It doesn’t make sense that 28 regulators should make different interpretations of the same law.”

It seems unlikely that Belgium would agree with that reasoning.

Photo by Robert Scoble