The largest fine issued by the FTC for this type of matters

Aug 10, 2012 12:21 GMT  ·  By

As has been rumored for a while now, Google has been ordered by the FTC to pay a $22.5 million, EUR18.23 million fine for bypassing the default privacy settings on Safari. That's the largest fine the FTC issued for this type of violation, but it's still an insubstantial amount for Google. More than the money though, it's Google image that has to suffer.

Google is already being hounded over privacy issues, imaginary or not, and it doesn't need the FTC fining it for a "privacy" issue. Still, Google did act rather stupidly to say the least and that's if it wasn't really mal intent.

Safari, by default, doesn't allow third-party cookies, i.e. cookies being set from other domains than the one the user is currently visiting. As you can imagine, this affects advertisers the most, though plenty of other services as well.

It's hard to find any website without third-party scripts and content these days. It could be ads served by an ad network, analytics scripts, Facebook like buttons and so on and so forth.

Google used a commonly known method to trick Safari into accepting cookies even though they were from a third party. It wasn't the only ad network to do so.

Google used the trick initially to be able to add +1 buttons to ads. But because the trick worked for any cookie coming from the DoubleClick domain, tracking ad cookies were also placed via the same method.

Google didn't get in trouble for that, per se. Instead, the FTC fined it because on one of its help pages, Google said Safari users had nothing to worry about when it came to tracking since the browser rejects third-party cookies by default.

Obviously, the team that wrote the help documents didn't know about the ad team that used the bypass to place cookies. Google is a big place.

But Google also promised the FTC that it would not mislead users about privacy policies and that it would disclose any behavior related to the issue. The "promise" in this case was legally binding and part of the settlement with the FTC over the Google Buzz privacy fiasco.