Microsoft was fined 60 million euros ($64 million) by France’s privacy authority, the National Commission for Technology and Freedoms (CNIL), for forcing advertising cookies on users.
The oversight authority made this statement on Thursday, adding that Microsoft’s Bing search engine did not have a system in place that allowed users to reject cookies in addition to accepting them.
The French authority claims that investigations have shown that “cookies were installed on users’ terminals when they visited this site without their authorization, and these cookies were exploited, among other things, for advertising reasons.”
Also, it “observed that there was no button allowing to refuse the deposit of cookies as easily as accepting it.”
Speaking on the fine, the CNIL said the fine was justified in part because of the profits the company made from advertising profits indirectly generated from the data collected via cookies.
Microsoft has been given three months to rectify the issue, with a potential further penalty of 60,000 euros per day overdue.
