The American firm Microsoft is accused of not having put in place a mechanism that makes it as easy to refuse cookies as to accept them “. This sanction comes from an investigation carried out by the CNIL from September 2020 to May 2021, concerning Microsoft’s bing.com search engine.
This is the largest fine imposed in 2022 by the French authority. The Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés had announced last year that it would carry out a campaign of checks on sites that do not respect privacy, and after having pinned down Google, Facebook and Amazon, the Cnil this time sanctions Microsoft by condemning the firm to a fine of 60 million euros, as announced this Thursday, December 22.
The authority justifies this amount by ” the scope of the processing, by the number of data subjects and by the profits that the American company has made from advertising revenue with these cookies.
Collect user consent
Since April 1, 2021, the countries of the European Union, and France in particular, have required websites to place a panel on their pages to allow Internet users to reject or accept “cookies” as simply as possible.
These small computer files that collect private data, give Internet giants the possibility of bombarding Internet users with so-called “targeted” ads.
Moreover, with this fine, the French digital regulator obliges Microsoft to collect, within three months, the consent of Internet users in France who could not easily accept or refuse these advertising cookies. Otherwise, the firm will be liable to pay a penalty payment of 60,000 euros per day of delay.