Google has been hit with the biggest fine in the history of the Federal Trade Commission: $22.5 million. It has to do with cookies, bits of computer code placed on your browser when you visit a website.
Jonathan Mayer is the Stanford grad student who brought Google's practices to light, which led to the fine. He says, "Google was setting cookies in Safari web browsers associated with their advertising service, "Double Click." And they'd made a representation on their website that, if you were a Safari user, you wouldn't be tracked by Google. So they breached that representation."The Safari browser is made by Apple.Ryan Calo, law professor at the University of Washington, says in the end the case against Google was pretty simple. "No one knows for sure whether or not Google was doing this on purpose with full knowledge or whether it was an accident. Either way, it doesn't really much matter from the Federal Trade Commission's perspective. Because all it cares about is the fact that Google had said that it was not doing this activity. It had publicly represented this."
- Date Published:08/10/2012
- Original Publication:Marketplace Tech