A French data privacy watchdog on Thursday fined Alphabet’s Google some 100 million euros or $121 million for reportedly breaching rules on online trackers, known as cookies.
The Commission Nationale de l’informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) said in a statement and it also slapped a 35 million euro fine on Amazon for breaching the same rules.
The CNIL claimed that both companies breached Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act.
The two American multinational technology companies were penalized for placing tracking cookies on their user’s computers in France “without obtaining prior consent and without providing adequate information.”
According to the CNIL, it discovered that Google committed 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,” CNIL wrote in its penalty notice.
Amazon, on the other hand, was found to have committed two violations.
