CNIL issues €130 million fines on Google and Amazon for data protection violations

According to TechCrunch, the French data protection authority CNIL has issued large fines against Google and Amazon for dropping tracking cookies without consent. Google was fined 100 million euro for dropping cookies on Google.fr, while Amazon 35 million euro for the same conduct on its Amazon .fr domain. Regarding Google, the CNIL found three consent violations related to dropping non-essential cookies. As for Amazon, its French site displayed a banner informing arriving visitors that they agreed to its use of cookies, but CNIL stated that it did not comply with transparency or consent requirements. The CNIL decision stated that ‘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 French Data Protection Act and the prior collection of the consent before the deposit of non-essential cookies’.