France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL), the country’s data privacy and protection body, has announced a 60 million euro ($68 million) sanction against Facebook and a 150 million euro ($170 million) penalty against Google.
The fines are for making it difficult for website visitors to reject tracking cookies by hiding the option behind multiple clicks.
Both Facebook and Google allow visitors to their website to accept the entire set of cookies in a single action by pressing a button available on the first page.
Rejecting the cookies, though, is a manual, discouraging process that requires users to disable them one by one.
As such, the committee that investigated the case following multiple complaints from French users established that Facebook and Google are:
- Making the cookie refusal mechanisms unnecessarily complicated
- Discouraging users from refusing cookies
- Encouraging users to give their consent to personal data collection
The practice is considered an infringement of the freedom of consent of internet users, and as such, it violates Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act.
