Text: “France fines Google, Facebook over cookies.” DW.com.
Extract: “France’s National Commission for Information Technology and Freedom (CNIL) on Thursday hit Facebook and Google with €210 million ($237 million) in fines.
CNIL has determined that the sites facebook.com, google.fr and youtube.com do not allow users to refuse the use of cookies as simply as to accept them,” the regulator said, referring to blocks of data that track online activity and can be used for targeted advertising, a major source of income for both companies.”
Google, Facebook and other companies use cookies to track user behaviour. There are legal limits as to how cookies can be collected and used but the laws different from country to country.
To what extent are cookies “knowledge that we should not pursue on ethical grounds?”