SAN FRANCISCO – Google is paying a record $22.5 million fine to settle allegations that it broke a privacy promise by secretly tracking millions of Web surfers who use Apple’s Safari browser. Google has agreed to pay up to 22.5 million to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to dispose of charges that it “misrepresented privacy assurances to users of Apple’s Safari browser.” What this means is that they encrypted code onto their web pages.
The fine is for misrepresenting what it was doing and not for the methods it used to bypass Safari’s tracker cookie settings. Cookies are small text files that are installed onto a computer to allow it to be identified so that a user’s web activity can be monitored. This is the largest fine that the FTC has imposed against a company for violating a previous agreement with the agency.
“No matter how big or small, all companies must abide by FTC orders against them and keep their privacy promises to consumers, or they will end up paying many times what it would have cost to comply in the first place,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement.
The BBC quotes a Google spokesman saying: “The FTC is focused on a 2009 help centre page published more than two years before our consent decree, and a year before Apple changed its cookie-handling policy.”
SOURCE: BBC
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