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Google is reported to have agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle claims that it broke promises about respecting consumer privacy. The fine would be the highest ever paid to the Federal Trade Commission.
The case centers on Apple’s Safari browser, which blocks tracking cookies by default. Google says that last year it used temporary cookies to place a button on web ads allowing users of the Google+ service to give a virtual thumbs up to an ad and share it with their online followers.
According to Google, a mistake in the way this was set up meant those users were unintentionally delivered targeted advertising based on their online activity.
The big problem here was that Google had deliberately taken advantage of a loophole that allows third-party cookies in Safari for collecting details in forms, for example when a visitor inputs their e-mail address when responding to an ad. Google had inserted bogus code that falsely made it look as if there was a form, thus letting it bypass the cookie rules.
The subsequent FTC investigation was particularly serious: it wasn’t simply the fact that Google was sneaky in this case that got it into trouble, but rather the fact that such behavior violated a consent decree. After the scandal over the Google Buzz social network, Google made a legally enforceable promise that it would not mislead the public about its privacy policies.
That’s exactly what happened here: despite the “workaround”, Google continued claiming on its help pages that Safari users with the default settings would not get any Google tracking cookies.
In theory Google could have been fined $16,000 for each individual breach: that is, one user being misled once. It’s not yet clear whether the FTC came up with the $22.5 million through a specific formula, whether it simply picked a number, or whether it negotiated a figure with Google.
The settlement hasn’t yet been officially announced as the agency’s commissioners must formally approve itat a forthcoming meeting
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