Google set to pay record $22.5M fine for violating Apple users’ privacy
[Via AppleInsider]
Google is expected to pay a $22.5 million fine, the largest in the history of the Federal Trade Commission, for bypassing the privacy settings of users of Apple’s Safari Web browser.
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They purposefully sent an invisible form in order to bypass what the user had stipulated, making it seem as though the user had requested an ad cookie when they had not. They broke a consent agreement saying they would not do this sort of thing.
And its interesting that this only happened with ads placed by the company that Google owned. I wonder if that made it look like Google was selling more ad impressions than it really was, increasing its own revenue.
As well as now tracking just what the user was doing. Makes you all warm and fuzzy, right, to think that Google was subverting your privacy setting to permit it to surreptitiously follow you.
If I was paying Google for ad views, I would begin to wonder just how many real eyeballs had seen my ad versus some sort of Google magic.
