Facebook will comply with a Belgian court ruling to stop tracking non-usersby requiring that all visitors log in to view the social network.

The changea response to the recent privacy rulingmeans that public content, including profiles of local businesses, will be blocked to anyone without a Facebook account. For the rest of the world, pages marked public on Facebook are accessible simply by traveling to their URL; no log-in required.

Last month, the Belgian Privacy Commission ordered Facebook to immediately stop the online tracking of folks who are not Facebook users. The company is appealing, but agreed to require these logins in the meantime rather than removing tracking cookies altogether.

"We had hoped to address the BPC's concerns in a way that allowed us to continue using a security cookie that protected Belgian people from more than 33,000 takeover attempts in the past month," a Facebook spokeswoman told PCMag.

"We're disappointed we were unable to reach an agreement and now people will be required to login or register for an account to see publicly available content on Facebook," the company said.

In April, Facebook admitted to secretly tracking non-members who visited third-party sites with an embedded "Like" button. But it wasn't a conscious move, the social network said, blaming a "bug" that was quickly fixed.

The Belgian Privacy Commission, however, did not buy it, and in May presented its concerns and recommendations to the social media firm, asking that it be more transparent. A month later, the BPC sued Facebook.

Facebook has argued that its tracking technology, known as "datr" cookies, have been in use "for more than five years to keep Facebook secure for 1.5 billion people around the world." As detailed in a letter to the BPC, Facebook's "Plan B" involves the halting and deleting of datr cookies for non-registered users in Belgium, "to the extent it is technically feasible."

In the past, the datr cookie helped to prevent the creation of fake and spammy accounts, reduce risk of account hacking, protect people's content, and stop DDoS attacks.

"If the court blocks us from using the datr cookie in Belgium, we could lose one of our best signals to demonstrate that someone is coming to our site legitimately," Facebook Chief Security Office Alex Stamos wrote in an October blog post.

The company will instead implement "other safety- and security-related measures," including additional checkpoints to verify the identity of anyone accessing Facebook.com.

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