Paris, France:
France’s CNIL information privacy watchdog stated Thursday it had fined two Google units a total of one hundred million euros and an Amazon subsidiary 35 million euros more than marketing cookies.
The regulator stated the fines had been “for having placed advertising cookies on the computers of users … without obtaining prior consent and without providing adequate information.”
A cookie is a compact piece of information stored on a user’s laptop browser that enables internet sites to determine customers and recall their earlier activity.
The CNIL stated when a user visited the web page google.fr, various cookies employed for marketing purposes had been automatically placed on his or her laptop, with no any action needed on the user’s component.
It stated a related issue occurred when going to a single web page on the amazon.fr web page.
CNIL stated this sort of cookie “can only be placed after the user has expressed his or her consent” and as a result violated regulations on getting prior consent.
It faulted Google for giving insufficient privacy details for customers as it did not let them know about the cookies which had been placed and that the process to block them nevertheless left a single operational.
CNIL also stated Amazon had not offered clear or total details about the cookies it placed on computer systems of customers till a redesign in September 2020.
Google also stopped putting cookies on the computer systems of customers with no consent in September, CNIL stated, but added it nevertheless does not provide a enough explanation for their use.
The regulator stated “no matter what path the users used to visit the website, they were either insufficiently informed or never informed of the fact that cookies were placed on their computer.”
The 35-million-euro ($42-million) fine is on the Amazon Europe Core subsidiary.
CNIL imposed fines of 60 million euros on Google LLC and 40 million euros on Google Ireland Limited.
(This story has not been edited by TheSpuzz employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)