The CNIL has recently issued two significant fines in relation to infringements by Amazon and Yahoo.
On 18 January 2024, the CNIL announced that it had fined Yahoo EMEA Limited (Yahoo) €10 million for unlawful use of cookies on its website and email service.
The CNIL found that Yahoo placed cookies on users’ devices without obtaining their prior consent, some of which had advertising purposes. The CNIL also found that Yahoo made it difficult for users to withdraw consent, as they were presented with messages that discouraged them from doing so and threatened them with losing access to their email accounts.
Full details of the reprimand can be found here.
On 23 January 2024, Amazon France Logistique, which manages Amazon group’s large warehouses in France, was fined €32 million in relation to non-compliant employee monitoring practices. The CNIL considered the practices to be excessive because:
- indicators tracking the inactivity time of employees’ scanners were put in place. The CNIL ruled that it was illegal to set up a system measuring work interruptions with such accuracy, potentially requiring employees to justify every break or interruption.
- the system for measuring the speed at which items were scanned was excessive. As items scanned very quickly increase the risk of error, an indicator measured whether an item had been scanned less than 1.25 seconds after the previous one.
- the retention period (31 days) for the data collected by the system, as well as the resulting statistical indicators, for all employees and temporary workers, was excessive.
Full details of the reprimand can be found here.
