The Cnil, guardian of the privacy of the French, has sanctioned the American computer giant Microsoft with a fine of 60 million euros for not allowing simply refusing “cookies” on its Bing search engine, according to a statement released Thursday.
It is the largest fine that the authority has imposed in 2022, which last year had announced a control campaign against websites that did not respect the rules on these web cookies, and which had already fixed on this subject Google, Facebook and Amazon.
The limited composition of the committee also ordered Microsoft to change its practices on the “bing.com” site within three months, under penalty of having to pay a fine of 60,000 euros per day of delay. The company is first sanctioned because the French users of its Bing search engine could not, until March 29, reject all “cookies” without going through a tedious configuration.
Advertising revenue generated from cookies
The CNIL has also identified installation of two Cookies without the consent of Internet users while serving advertising purposes. For these violations related to the European ePrivacy Directive transposed into French law in the Data Protection Act, Cnil can impose a fine of up to 2% of global turnover.
In its press release, Cnil justified the size of the fine “by the scope of the processing (of data), by the number of affected persons and by the profit that the company obtains advertising revenue that is indirectly generated from data collected by cookies“.
At the end of December 2021, the search giant Google and the social network Facebook were sanctioned by Cnil with fines of respectively 150 and 60 million euros for similar fractures. Google and Amazon were also fined in late 2020 for not informing users about “cookies”.
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