France Fines Google $120M and Amazon $42M for Dropping Tracking Cookies Without Consent

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France fines Google $120M and Amazon $42M for dropping tracking cookies without consent - TechCrunch:

France's data protection agency, the CNIL, has slapped Google and Amazon with fines for dropping tracking cookies without consent.

Google has been hit with a total of 100 million ($120 million) for dropping cookies on Google.fr and Amazon 35 million (~$42 million) for doing so on the Amazon .fr domain under the penalty notices issued today.

The regulator carried out investigations of the websites over the past year and found tracking cookies were automatically dropped when a user visited the domains in breach of the country's Data Protection Act.

In Google's case the CNIL has found three consent violations related to dropping non-essential cookies.

"As this type of cookies cannot be deposited without the user having expressed his consent, the restricted committee considered that the companies had not complied with the requirement provided for by article 82 of the Data Protection Act and the prior collection of the consent before the deposit of non-essential cookies," it writes in the penalty notice [which we've translated from French].

Amazon was found to have made two violations, per the CNIL penalty notice.

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