Accused by the CNIL of not respecting the law on cookies, Google and Facebook will have to pay a heavy fine, and quickly review their copy.
The year 2022 is definitely starting on high speed for the CNIL. After having sanctioned Free Mobile up to € 300,000 for several breaches of the GDPR, the National Commission for Informatics and Freedoms has just imposed a new fine, this time against Google and Facebook. Through his limited training, empowered to pronounce sanctions against bad students of digital technology, the French gendarme thus reproaches the sites facebook.com, google.fr and youtube.com, of wanting too much to encourage Internet users to accept the deposit of cookies. Concretely, while a single click is enough to accept everything en bloc, “Several clicks are necessary to refuse all cookies”.
A practice which for the CNIL, “Violates the freedom of consent: since, on the Internet, the user expects to be able to quickly consult a site, the fact of not being able to refuse cookies as simply as one can accept them biases his choice in favor of consent ”. A direct violation of article 82 of the Data Protection Act, which the French gendarme intends to sanction. Thus, the restricted formation today formalized three fines of 210 million euros cumulated against the two GAFAMs. While Facebook Ireland will have to pay 60 million euros, Google LLC and Google Ireland, for their part, are 150 million euros in penalties.
In addition to these two fines, the CNIL also calls on Google and Facebook to quickly become compliant. The web giants now have three months to offer Internet users a way to refuse advertising cookies while guaranteeing their freedom of consent. Otherwise, the companies will each have to pay a fine of 100,000 euros per day of delay.
Declared more than two years ago, the legislation on cookies and Internet tracers has long been subject to a compliance period, in order to allow web players to review their copy smoothly. Since March 31, the tolerance applied by the CNIL has ended, and the French gendarme has already been forced to adopt nearly 100 corrective measures (sanctions or formal notices) related to non-compliance with the legislation on cookies. .
