France fines Google $120m and Amazon $43m data protection breach

France’s data protection agency, the CNIL, issued fines against Google and Amazon for dropping so-called tracking cookies without consent.

Google was hit with penalties of €100m ($120m) for dropping cookies on Google.fr and Amazon €35m ($42m) for the same reason on its Amazon .fr domain.

The fines come after the regulator investigated the sites over the past year and found that the tracking cookies were dropped when a user entered the domains.

The regulator found three consent violations in Google’s case and two consent violations in Amazon’s.

Aside from the violations, users were not given accurate and transparent information regarding the cookies provided.

This entails a breach of the country’s Data Protection Act.

“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,” TechCrunch reported the French regulator saying.