from the play-by-the-rules-or-pay-for-the-breaches dept.
French regulators to fine Google and Facebook combined $235 million for cookie tracking: report:
Google and Facebook are facing major fines in France for not making it easy enough for French users to reject technology that tracks cookies, according to a report from Politico on Wednesday.
Reporters from the outlet obtained documents that showed French tech regulator Commission Nationale de I'informatique et Des Libertés (CNIL) is planning to fine Google 150 million euros and Facebook 60 million euros for violating French data privacy rules.
CNIL says in the document that both companies will be fined another 100,000 euros per day if they do not resolve the issues within three months of the decision being issued. Politico noted that this applies to google.fr, youtube.fr and all of Facebook's platforms in France.
[...] European regulators have fined Google more than 8 billion euros for a variety of alleged anticompetitive practices and Google lost an appeal for one of the 2.42 billion euro fines in September.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by stretch611 on Friday January 07 2022, @03:36AM (2 children)
Cookie Tracking should be the one legal type of tracking... It is fairly easy to find out... pretty much any privacy plug in can detect and deal with it and all you have to do is remove the damn cookie.
All the other tracking techniques should be made illegal. The ones that are not as easy to deal with.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 07 2022, @05:20AM (1 child)
There's the matter of informed consent, which the GDPR seems to emphasize. If the information, and the choice, is presented clearly and concisely (not hidden in 23 pages of mumbo jumbo) and a person CHOOSES to allow tracking - everything should be fine. Otherwise, it should be illegal.
There is also the matter of user sophistication. Not every user understands how to set up cookie deletion, and blocking of third sites, or how to whitelist some particular cookies. You might argue that it's not hard to do, but someone might argue that it isn't covered in school, and we can't reasonably presume that everyone knows how to do that.
I want to see all tracking stopped, with the exception outlined above. Clear, concise, easily understood, and able to opt out at any time. Tracking is tantamount to stalking.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 07 2022, @06:55AM
It's about europe, they don't give a bloody fuck about the presumptions of texarkassholians.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday January 07 2022, @10:59AM (2 children)
Why cookies? Cookies are controlled entirely by the client. Why would a website be guilty for the client sending cookies? That would be like mailing your personal info to someone and then suing them for identity theft.
If someone does not wish to send cookies to service, and service does not service the user without cookies, then the user can simply not use the service.
If service cannot be avoided due to illegal/anticompetitive practices, then sue them for that, not for the cookies.
Should users have no personal responsibility, or is the government responsible for babysitting adult citizens (or the children of said adults)?
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by rigrig on Friday January 07 2022, @11:36AM (1 child)
Because there are many legitimate uses for cookies, so EUians have decided that users should be able to simply tell a site they don't want any tracking cookies, instead of figuring out for every site they visit whether "__uid=125798" is used to track them, keep their session logged in, or both.
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday January 07 2022, @07:52PM
>whether "__uid=125798" is used to track them, keep their session logged in, or both.
Those are the same thing. Or are you suggesting websites use a "logged_in=true" cookie for logins?
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