The CNIL sanctions Google and Facebook for not allowing users to easily refuse cookies – Lexology

Cookies have now been a hot regulatory topic for some time, especially in France where the CNIL ranked cookies in its top-three investigation priorities for the last two years and initiated a variety of guidance and enforcement actions. In this context, the French authority concluded year 2021 with two significant decisions against Google and Facebook regarding the means to refuse cookies. In the two decisions, the CNIL criticized Google and Facebook for not offering internet users a means to refuse cookies as easily as they can accept them. The French authority fined Google a total of 150 million euros (€90M for Google LLC and €60M for Google Ireland Limited) and fined Facebook 60 million euros. It also enjoined both to “modify. . .the methods for obtaining the consent of users located in France to the reading and/or writing of information in their terminal, by offering them a means of refusing these operations that is as simple as the mechanism for their acceptance” with a daily penalty of €100,000 per day of delay in complying with the injunction after three months of the notification of the decision.  The sanction procedures were based on online investigations led by the CNIL agents on…
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