Microsoft was fine EUR 60 million by a French privacy watchdog for employing advertising cookies on the Bing website.

Users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine cannot just accept or reject cookies claims French regulator CNIL. Microsoft fined EUR 60 million.

The French privacy authority announced its judgement on Thursday and imposed a fine of EUR 60 million ($64 million) on the US IT giant Microsoft.

According to the National Commission for Technology and Freedoms (CNIL) . Which hand out the worst penalty in 2022 .Microsoft’s Bing search engine lacked a structure that made it as simple for consumers to decline cookies.

The report “found that there was no button enabling to deny the deposit of cookies as easy as accepting it” as well. The CNIL claimed that the fine was justified in part by the advertising earnings the business .

Advertising fraud:

Bing stated that users could accept all cookies instantly by clicking a button. But that rejecting them required two clicks. The business has three months to fix the problem or face an additional fine of EUR 60,000 (approximately Rs. 52 lakh) every day late.

Microsoft Ireland, the location of the company’s European headquarters. Microsoft said in a statement that, “Even before this inquiry commenced, we initiated critical modifications to our cookie policies.”

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“We remain sincerely worried about the CNIL’s stance on advertising fraud. When a user visits a website, cookies are download to their computer. Enabling web browsers to store information about the user’s experience. They are incredibly useful for IT platforms as methods of individualized advertising. Now Microsoft fined EUR 60 million.

CNIL:

However, privacy activists have long resisted. Due to new regulations imposed by the European Union’s 2018 personal data law, internet service providers are now required to obtain users’ agreement before installing cookies.

The CNIL said last year that it would review websites for a year to see if they were utilizing web cookies according to the laws.

For identical violations involving their use of cookies, Google and Facebook were penalize by the French authorities with fines of EUR 150 million (approximately Rs. 1,300 crore) and EUR 60 million (about Rs. 530 crore), respectively.

The two businesses are also under investigation for their practice of transmitting the personal information of EU citizens to servers in the US.