(Bloomberg) — Google’s bid to overturn a 100 million-euro ($114 million) French fine hit a snag after an aide to the nation’s top court backed accusations against the search engine over its cookies policy.
The Alphabet Inc. unit has been embroiled in a court fight over the then-record fine in 2020 for targeting users with cookies without their consent and failing to offer a simple way to reject the tracking devices. Google was hit with a new record 150 million-euro penalty last week for still not allowing users an easy way out of its cookies.
But court adviser Laurent Domingo said at a hearing Wednesday that the initial penalty was justified because Google “failed to abide” by its “obligations, even though these were clear.”
He criticized Google for failing to seek the consent of google.fr users to place cookies on their computers or informing them adequately, and for having an inefficient mechanism to block these tracking devices.
European Union data protection regulators have gained unprecedented fining powers since the bloc’s so-called 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.
Read more: Google, Facebook Slapped With French Privacy Fines Over Cookies
A ruling in Google’s case at France’s Conseil d’Etat is expected in a few weeks.
Google’s lawyers claim French regulators didn’t have jurisdiction and asked that the matter be clarified by EU courts. Google declined to comment on the case when contacted by Bloomberg.
Patrice Spinosi, a lawyer for the Mountain View, California-based company, also criticized the “haste” of CNIL, the French privacy agency.
He pointed out that the decision to start the probe into Google’s cookies policy was taken on a Sunday and officials proceeded to verifications the following Monday, a day before a nationwide lockdown began in March 2020 to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
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