(Bloomberg) — Google lost its bid to topple a record 100 million-euro ($112 million) fine from French privacy watchdogs over how it manages its cookies.
France’s top administrative court backed regulators who in 2020 criticized the search giant for automatically placing the tracking devices — often used to gather data for advertising purposes — on the devices of google.fr users as soon as they arrived on the website.
CNIL was right to find that Google’s behavior “amounted to a lack of clear and compete information of users, a failure to seek their prior consent and a deficient mechanism to block the cookies,” Conseil d’Etat judges said in their Friday ruling.
The Alphabet Inc. unit and French privacy watchdog CNIL have locked horns twice in two years over the use of cookies to track users online movements. Earlier this month, CNIL set a fresh record when it hit Google with a 150 million-euro penalty for still not giving users an easy way out of its cookies.
Read more: Google, Facebook Slapped With French Privacy Fines Over Cookies
A Google spokesperson said it implemented the changes required by CNIL in 2021 and added that the company remains committed to constructive engagement with the regulator.
European Union data protection regulators have gained unprecedented fining powers since the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, took effect in May 2018, which allows them to levy penalties of as much as 4% of a company’s annual global sales. The latest Google fines are based on yet another set of rules regulating the use of online tracking devices and come amid a much fiercer climate of regulatory scrutiny of tech giants worldwide.
(Updates with details on ruling, Google comment starting in third paragraph)
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