Microsoft Fined $64 Million By France Over Cookies Used in Bing Searches (scmagazine.com) 14
France's privacy watchdog fined Microsoft $64 million for not offering clear enough instruction for users to reject cookies used for online ads, as part of the move to enforce Europe's tightening data protection law. From a report: CNIL, France's digital privacy regulator, said Thursday that it carried out several investigations on the Microsoft search engine Bing in September 2020 and May 2021 and found that the site dropped advertising cookies in users' terminals without their explicit consent.
The website also lacked a button for users to reject cookies as simply as accepting them, CNIL said, where two clicks were required to refuse all cookies while only one was needed to accept them. Cookies are small files that track and monitor the sites users have visited and are often used to help personalize online ads. According to CNIL, the $64 million fine against Microsoft is justified partly because of the scope of revenue the company made from advertising indirectly generated from the data collected via cookies.
The website also lacked a button for users to reject cookies as simply as accepting them, CNIL said, where two clicks were required to refuse all cookies while only one was needed to accept them. Cookies are small files that track and monitor the sites users have visited and are often used to help personalize online ads. According to CNIL, the $64 million fine against Microsoft is justified partly because of the scope of revenue the company made from advertising indirectly generated from the data collected via cookies.
What? No! (Score:2)
"Cookies are small files that track and monitor the sites users have visited and are often used to help personalize online ads."
No they're not. They're a feature that allows a website to read and write data that's supposed to be tied to their own domain. As far as I know they were created for things like user settings, shopping carts, etc.
These days they're abused to track and monitor users, but that's not what they are for.
That's like saying 1x1 pixels exist to track and monitor users. Stop twisting realit
Re: (Score:1)
The quoted statement is absolutely, unequivocally true. Cookies *are* small files that track and monitor the sites users have visited and are often used to help personalize online ads. They have other uses, which include the original uses regarding storing domain state data - the original intended use case - but the statement was about how they are being used today, and it is a privacy nightmare.
Micro$oft was not making cookies hard to block because the wanted you to have a shopping cart.
Re: (Score:2)
Cookies *are* small files
Actually, I think nowadays they are records in a SQLite database.. :)
Reject cookie? (Score:1)
Me love cookie!! OM NOM NOM NOM
Everyone should be fined (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Make it happen.
Complain to the website that they are not compliant. Recital 32 is the one to cite.
If they don't fix it, ask them for a final response and wait a month. Then complain to your regulator. Cite this judgement, even if you aren't in France.
It takes little effort and in my experience it gets results.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't trust tech... (Score:2)
Don't trust tech companies, I use plugins and other tools to avoid cookies, fingerprinting, etc.
Companies will put out the great privacy respecting commitment, but there is no way to know, and given how complex use agreements are, plenty of loop holes.
$64 Million fine for Trillion dollar Microsoft like other big tech is hardly even a slap on the wrist...Now if France banned or blocked Bing for say a month that might be more interesting consequence.
JoshK.
Why not a feature in the browser? (Score:2)
If the cookies have become so intrusive, why don't major browsers make an easy way to manage them? They are the ones sending back the tracking IDs to the servers.
I like the idea behind GDPR, but I think it is not the correct approach here...
Re: (Score:2)
It is not gdpr, it is another regulation