• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 3, 2015

Facebook said this week that it will stop tracking non-users in Belgium while it appeals a recent decision by the country's privacy officials.

The company also will now block people in Belgium who aren't registered and logged in from accessing Facebook.com. In the past, anyone could access many Facebook pages found through search engines, including pages for small businesses, sports teams, celebrities and tourist attractions.

The social networking service's move comes three weeks after Belgian officials ordered the company to stop setting tracking cookies when non-users visit Facebook.com. Doing so enabled Facebook to track those people when they visited sites with a "Like" button.

"Facebook can not follow people on the internet who are not members of Facebook which is very logical because they can not have given permission to follow them," Bart Tommelein, Belgian secretary of state for the protection of privacy, reportedly said last month in a statement emailed to Reuters.

Facebook unsuccessfully argued to the Belgian Privacy Commission that tracking cookies helped the company prevent security breaches and protect people from spam and malware. This week, the company reiterated those points.

"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 spokesperson said in a statement. "We're disappointed we were unable to reach an agreement and now people will be required to log in or register for an account to see publicly available content on Facebook," a Facebook spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that the company expects the Belgian authorities to require other companies to stop tracking non-users. "We expect the BPC to apply these restrictions across the web, which could restrict Belgians' access to websites with maps, videos, share buttons, and similar content,” the spokesperson said.