This is the largest fine imposed in 2022 by the National Commission for Computing and Liberties (CNIL). The authority, guardian of the private life of the French, sanctioned the large American group specializing in computer science Microsoft with a fine of 60 million euros, for not having allowed to simply refuse cookies on its search engine. Bing search, according to a statement released Thursday, December 22.
The CNIL had announced last year a campaign of controls against sites not respecting the rules concerning these cookies of the Web 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.
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 had advertising purposes.
Google and Facebook already sanctioned
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.
In its press release, the CNIL justified the amount of the fine “by the scope of the processing [de données]by the number of people concerned and by the profits that the company derives from the advertising revenue indirectly generated from the data collected by the cookies”.
Google and the social network Facebook were sanctioned at the end of December 2021 by the CNIL with fines of 150 million 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.