A Belgian court asked Facebook to stop tracking the users who are not signed into Facebook and those who do not have accounts on the same. The social networking giant has been given 48 hours to follow the order failing which it should pay a fine of €270,000 (approximately $250,000) per day.

The court stated that Facebook uses a cookie to track user activity by placing itself in the user's browser when they visit Facebook, and these cookies track user events even thought the user isn't logged into the site. The cookie is stored for up to two years and interacts with Facebook whenever user visits any of the webpages on this social networking site. The judge ruled that these are personal data and can only with the explicit consent of user, as required by Belgian law for the protection of privacy.

The decision applies to Internet users who are not members of Facebook, and those haven't given consent to use their data. After the decision of the Belgian court, the Facebook spokesperson said the following in a statement:

We’ve used the datr cookie for more than five years to keep Facebook secure for 1.5 billion people around the world. We will appeal this decision and are working to minimize any disruption to people’s access to Facebook in Belgium.

Earlier In May this year, the Belgian Commission for the Protection of Privacy (CPP) threatened Facebook with prosecution and had asked them to renounce the use of some cookies and tools like Facebook Connect, which allows to monitor and identify Internet users outside the social network.

Facebook had then claimed that the report on which the Commission relied was wrong.