News Desk
PARIS: France’s privacy watchdog on Thursday announced fining United States tech giant Microsoft 60 million euros ($64 million) for foisting advertising cookies on users.
The country’s regulator of personal data, the National Commission for Technology and Freedoms (CNIL) said that Microsoft’s search engine Bing had not set up any system to allow users to refuse the deposit of cookies as easily as accepting it, according to AFP.
CNIL said it was found during an investigation that “when users visited the site, cookies were deposited on their terminal without their consent,” adding that the “cookies were used for advertising, alongside other purposes.”
Large advertising profits of Microsoft
The CNIL said the fine was justified partly because of the large sums made by the company from advertising profits indirectly generated from the data collected via cookies. The tech giant has been given a three-month period to redress the matter, with a potential additional penalty of 60,000 euros per day overdue.
The watchdog said last year that it would carry out year-long checks against sites not abiding by the rules related to the use of web cookies. Last year, the French regulator sanctioned Google and Facebook with fines of €150m and €60m respectively for similar breaches.
Cookies are small blocks of data from a website that are stored within a web browser and can be retrieved later by the site. The web server uses them to track if a user has returned to the website.
