Closure of the injunction issued against GOOGLE
By decision of 13 July 2023, the CNIL's restricted committee closed the injunction issued on 31 December 2021 against Google LLC and GOOGLE IRELAND LIMITED.
On 31 December 2021, in addition to imposing a fine of 150 million euros, the CNIL's restricted committee ordered GOOGLE LLC and GOOGLE IRELAND LIMITED to allow users of the websites google.fr and youtube.com located in France to refuse the cookies placed on their terminal as easily as to accept them, within three months.
Failure to comply with this order exposed the company to the payment of a fine of 100,000 euros per day overdue.
In view of the response provided, within the time limit, by GOOGLE LLC and GOOGLE IRELAND LIMITED, which installed on google.fr and youtube.com a refusal button entitled “Only allow essential cookies” near the acceptance button, and considering that the company had complied with the injunction issued, the restricted committee decided to close the procedure on 13 July 2023.
This closure only concerns the scope of the injunction issued by the restricted committee in its deliberation of 31 December 2021.
Indeed, this decision to close the procedure does not anticipate a CNIL's analysis of the compliance of the new cookie consent windows deployed on the google.fr and youtube.com websites with all the provisions of Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act, in particular:
- the classification of cookies exempted from consent;
- the requirement to provide “clear and complete” information or the requirement to collect consent for each purpose.
The CNIL therefore reserves the right to check the compliance of the google.fr and youtube.com websites with these other requirements in the future and, if necessary, to resort to enforcement actions.