France’s Commission Nationale de L’informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) – the country’s regulatory body in charge of personal data privacy, said on Thursday, December 22, it had fined US technology company Microsoft €60 million ($64 million) over its use of advertising cookies.
In the largest fine imposed so far this year, the CNIL said Microsoft’s search engine Bing had not set up a simple system allowing users to refuse cookies in the same manner they can accept them.
Read more: France’s Privacy Watchdog Fines Microsoft Over Cookies
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, small data files that track online browsing.
Microsoft was given three months to rectify the issue, with a potential further penalty of €60,000 per day overdue.
