Google and Amazon have both been hit with substantial fines from the French data-protection regulator, CNIL, for invading users’ privacy, reported Fortune.
On Thursday, December 10, the watchdog fined Google €100 million (US$121 million), double the penalty it levied on the firm last year over Android privacy violations, and Amazon €35 million. Crucially, it has also ordered them to start clearly telling users why they track them.
In both cases, CNIL stated the companies had illegally deposited tracking cookies in users’ browsers without their prior consent, while failing to clearly disclose to the users it was leaving the cookies in order to show them personalized ads.
“When a user deactivated the ad personalization on the Google search by using the available mechanism…one of the advertising cookies was still stored on his or her computer and kept reading information aimed at the server to which it is attached,” CNIL said in a statement.
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