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Facebook Wins Belgian Court Appeal Over Storing Non-User Data (bloomberg.com)
Stephanie Bodoni, and Aoife White reporting for Bloomberg Technology (condensed):Facebook won an appeal against a Belgian privacy ruling that prompted the social network to prevent people without an account from accessing its site within the country. The Brussels Court of Appeal said the nation's data protection authority couldn't prevent Facebook from storing data from non-users in a fight over measures the technology giant says help it combat hacking attacks. "Belgian courts don't have international jurisdiction over Facebook Ireland, where the data concerning Europe is processed," the Brussels court of appeal said in a ruling Wednesday, referring to the company's European headquarters. The court also said there was no urgency to rule on the case since Belgian court proceedings only started in mid-2015 over behavior that started in 2012. Facebook is appealing a ruling that ordered it to stop storing data from people who don't have an account with the social network, or face a 250,000 euro ($277,800) daily fine. Willem Debeuckelaere, president of the Belgian data protection commission, said last year that Facebook's "disrespectful" treatment of users' personal data, without their knowledge, "needs tackling." Facebook said it can now start showing its pages to Belgians who aren't signed up to its service.
It's all a bit muddy, but as far as I understand it, the law does not disallow non-users to access Facebook.
I think it's like this: the privacy commission thinks (and I agree) that Facebook should not be allowed to track non-users: they have never agreed to it. Instead of stopping the tracking, Facebook denies access to non-users.
Also, that is not about all of the site, and certainly not about registration pages. IIRC it's about Facebook pages of companies, organisations, events and stuff. These days, it seems, there are quite a lot of organisations that don't have a proper website of their own, just a Facebook page (which is mostly pretty uninformative, but that's besides the point).
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"Belgian courts don't have international jurisdiction over Facebook Ireland, where the data concerning Europe is processed"
They may not have jurisdiction over other countries, but why can't they say if Facebook wants to do business IN Belgium, their data centers outside of Belgium must follow their rules?
I don't consider myself the paranoid type, but you're talking about a company that goes out of its way to create a profile of people who haven't signed up. What make you think that if you do sign up and put as little information on it as possible, that they will stop collecting information about you that you haven't put on it.