France slams Google, Amazon with €135m fine over data privacy issue

The data privacy watchdog of France, CNIL has slapped a combined €135 fine on both Google and Amazon for dropping tracking cookies without consent on their site.

CNIL hit Google with a total of €100 million ($120M) for dropping cookies on Google.fr and Amazon €35M (~42M) for doing so on the Amazon.fr domain under the penalty notices issued on Thursday.

The French data protection agency revealed in a statement that it slammed both Google and Amazon with the fine carrying out investigations of the websites over the past year.

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According to CNIL, both Google and Amazon were fined after it was discovered that tracking cookies were automatically dropped when a user visited the domains in breach of the country’s Data Protection Act.

In Google’s case the CNIL has found three consent violations related to dropping non-essential cookies.

“As this type of cookies cannot be deposited without the user having expressed his consent, the restricted committee considered that the companies had not complied with the requirement provided for by article 82 of the Data Protection Act and the prior collection of the consent before the deposit of non-essential cookies,” the CNIL wrote in its penalty notice to Google and Amazon.

Further information revealed that Amazon was also found to have made two violations, per the CNIL penalty notice.

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