This is the largest fine imposed this year by the CNIL.
The guardian of French privacy has fined US IT giant Microsoft 60 million euros for failing to simply refuse "cookies" on its search engine Bing, according to a statement released Thursday.
Last year, the authority had carried out a campaign of controls against sites not respecting the rules on these web cookies and had previously pinned on this subject Google, Facebook and Amazon.
The restricted formation of the committee also ordered Microsoft to modify its practices on the “bing.com” site within three months, under penalty of having to pay a penalty of 60,000 euros per day of delay.
Cookies installed without the consent of Internet users
The company is first sanctioned because French users of its Bing search engine could not, until March 29, refuse all “cookies” without going through a tedious configuration.
The Cnil also identified the installation of two cookies without the consent of Internet users, while they served advertising purposes.
For these breaches related to the European ePrivacy directive transposed into French law in the Data Protection Act, the Cnil could impose a fine of up to 2% of worldwide turnover.
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In its press release, the Cnil justified the amount of the fine "by the scope of the processing (of data), by the number of people concerned and by the profits that the company derives from the advertising revenues indirectly generated 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 breaches.
Google and Amazon were also sanctioned at the end of 2020 for failing to inform users about "cookies".
