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 having allowed simply rejecting “cookies” in its Bing search engine, according to a statement released this Thursday.
This is the largest fine pronounced in 2022 by the authority, which last year announced a control campaign against sites that do not respect the rules on cookies on these websites and had already fixed Google, Facebook and Amazon.
The restricted formation of the commission also ordered Microsoft to modify its practices on the “bing.com” site within three months, on pain of paying a fine of 60,000 euros per day of delay.
The company is penalized first because French users of its Bing search engine were unable, until March 29, to reject all “cookies” without going through tedious configuration. The Cnil also identified the installation of two cookies without the consent of Internet users, while they were used for advertising purposes.
For these violations related to the European ePrivacy directive transposed into French law in the Data Protection Law, the Cnil could impose a fine of up to 2% of global billing.
In its press release, the Cnil justified the amount of the fine “by the scope of the treatment (of data), by the number of people affected and by the benefits that the company obtains from the advertising revenue generated indirectly from the data collected by cookies”.
The search giant Google and the social network Facebook had been sanctioned at the end of December 2021 by the Cnil with fines of 150 and 60 million euros respectively for similar infractions. Google and Amazon were also penalized in late 2020 for failing to inform users about “cookies.”
Source: BFM TV
