Microsoft received a jolt at the end of this year when France’s data watchdog CNIL imposed a penalty of €60m or $64 million, largest imposed by the digital privacy functionary in this year. The penalty was pronounced on the tech giant for not allowing its Bing users to refuse cookies, as it is made it mandatory and is against the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The investigating agency confirmed the cookies were being used by the Windows OS giant for Ad purposes and later it induced a mechanism of allowing its users to refuse them with the help of two mouse clicks.
Since the company was making profits by selling the cookie data to ad firms, it violated a few GDPR rules, CNIL added.
A 3-month time frame has been given to the search giant, after which the penalty might be increased by 30% per day.
As Microsoft Ireland was operating in Europe, it received the penalty order and has been asked to rectify the data collection flaws that were against the prevailing data laws.
In the 3Q of 2021, Google and Facebook were imposed penalties of €150m and €73m, respectively.
The other news related to the same company and trending on Google is the newly discovered security flaw on MacOS Gatekeeper software. The new flaw is technically named as Achilles and has been given a 5.5 rating, i.e., a medium level threat.
Though the Achilles threat was fixed with a patch in October this year, most of the devices are still found exhibiting the vulnerability, thus allowing apps to easily bypass Gatekeeper security policies.
