Facebook locks out unregistered users from pages after Belgium privacy ruling

Change is initially only in place in Belgium, though lawyers have said that it could be moved everywhere

Facebook hopes the tools will help people end relationships with greater "ease, comfort and sense of control". (Getty)

Facebook pages won’t be visible to anyone unless they are logged into the site, in a major new policy change.

The network will now require everyone to login before seeing any public pages. The ruling comes after a major policy decision in Belgium last month.

The country’s Privacy Commission said that the site should not be able track people who come to such pages without being logged in. In response to a court ruling, Facebook has now banned people from seeing the pages altogether.

Though the change is for now restricted to users in Belgium, lawyers have previously told The Independent that the effects of the ruling are likely to spread across Europe, meaning that the change could come to the entire continent.

Public Facebook pages are often used as a way of advertising businesses, even to people who don’t use or have logins for the site. The pages allow companies and individuals to host information about themselves, such as their address and contact details.

The Belgian Privacy Commission argued that tracking users that hadn’t logged in was against privacy law. The site claimed that the tracking and the cookies required to do it were important for blocking takeover attempts of people’s accounts and attacks against the site.