France fines Microsoft 60 million euros for poor cookie policies

The National Commission for Technology and Freedoms (CNIL), France’s privacy watchdog has fined Microsoft 60 million euros for foisting advertising cookies on end-users.

As per CNIL Microsoft’s search engine Bing didn’t provide options for users to deny cookie tracking and their consent wasn’t accounted before acting on it.

The regulator said that after investigating Microsoft’s cookie methodology it is found that when users viewed a website, the cookies were collected on their terminal without user consent and cookies were used for advertising purposes.

Microsoft penalized for illegal collection of users data

The overall mechanism was not easy to deny the cookie collection but only to accept it. CNIL mentioned that the fine was justified as Microsoft’s penalty are proportionate to that of the profits made by Microsoft via data collected from cookies.

Microsoft has been given three months to fix the cookie collection mechanism, failing it, there will further penalty of 60,000 euros per day.  CNIL sent a warning earlier last week about investigating sites that aren’t following rules on web cookies and it seems Microsoft didn’t take that seriously.

It is also to be remembered that Google and Facebook faced sanctions last year for a amount of 150 million and 60 million euros respectively for poor privacy practices.

Subscribe to our newsletter for daily alerts on cyber events, you can also follow us on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.

You can reach out to us via Twitter/ Facebook or mail us at admin@thecybersecuritytimes.com for advertising requests.