One of the top software developers in the world and US IT giant Microsoft has been compelled to pay €60 million ($64 million) after French authorities found it guilty of breaking local laws. The nation’s privacy authority announced that it had fined the corporation over its dishonest use of ad cookies, which is now the largest this year.
When a user visits a website, a web server creates and sends little informational files called cookies to the user’s web browser. They are frequently used for advertising as well as to customize the user experience.
The National Commission for Technology and Freedoms (CNIL) of France claimed in a statement on Thursday that Microsoft’s Bing search engine did not make it simple enough for users to reject cookies.
French investigators’ investigations revealed that “cookies were put on users’ terminals without their knowledge when they visited this site.” These cookies “were utilized, among other things, for advertising reasons,” the watchdog reported.
Additionally, the CNIL discovered that “no button allowed to deny the deposit of cookies as easy as accepting it.”
The watchdog clarified that Microsoft ultimately received a cut of third-party advertising revenues that grew as a result of the information gathered by cookies.
The US IT juggernaut has three months to adapt its services to French laws. It will be subject to an extra fine of €60,000 for each day it is late if it does not do so in a timely manner.
Google and Facebook both received penalties of €150 million and €60 million from the CNIL for comparable violations last year.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Microsoft was working to allay antitrust concerns raised earlier by the EU. These concerns were reportedly sparked by a complaint made by the office messaging app Slack last year, which claimed that the US tech giant had unfairly integrated Teams, a workplace chat and video app, into its Office product.
Microsoft has been the subject of many EU investigations over the past ten years, and as a result, the authorities have levied fines against the company totaling €2.2 billion.
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