A total of 60 million euros equals 64 million dollars, was fined by France’s privacy watchdog against well-known tech giant Microsoft on Thursday.
The reason behind the fine was that Microsoft was foisting advertising cookies on users which makes it the largest fine imposed this year.
The National Commission for Technology and Freedoms (CNIL) said Microsoft’s search engine Bing had not arranged a system permitting users to deny cookies as implied as acknowledging them.
The French regulator said that after analyses it found that “when users visited this site, cookies were deposited on their terminal without their consent, while these cookies were used, among others, for advertising purposes.”
It also “observed that there was no button allowing to refuse the deposit of cookies as easily as accepting it.”
The CNIL said the penalty was justified in part because of the gains the corporation made from advertising profits indirectly yielded from the data collected via cookies — tiny data files that follow online browsing.
The corporation has been provided three months to correct the issue, with a possible further detriment of 60,000 euros per day overdue.
Last year the CNIL said it would carry out a year of reviews against sites not obeying the laws on using web cookies.
Google and Facebook were sanctioned last year by the CNI with penalties of 150 million and 60 million euros respectively for identical breaches.