Google to pay record $22.5m fine to FTC over Safari tracking

By AGENCIES

GOOGLE is to pay a record $22.5m (£14.4m) fine to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US after it tracked users of Apple's iPhone, iPad and Mac computers by circumventing privacy protections on the Safari web browser for several months at the end of 2011 and into 2012.

The fine is the largest paid by one company to the FTC, which imposed a 20-year privacy order on Google in March 2010 after concerns about the launch of its ill-fated Buzz social network.

In the latest case, commissioners ruled 4-1 that Google had breached that order not to mislead consumers about its privacy practices. There was no admission of wrongdoing on the part of Google.

Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC, said in a statement: "The record setting penalty in this matter sends a clear message to all companies under an FTC privacy order. 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."

The intrusion would have affected millions of users of Apple devices, which web statistics suggest are used for substantial amounts of mobile browsing in western countries particularly.

The FTC began investigating the case six months ago after Jonathan Mayer, a researcher at Stanford University – once attended by Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin – discovered that Google's DoubleClick advertising network was overriding safeguards built into Safari to stop cookies being used to track peoples' movements around the web.

Cookies can be used as unique identifiers of a user, so that if someone goes from one site to an unrelated one that also uses DoubleClick, the cookie will work as an identifier and mean that adverts on that site, and their activity there, will be logged and tailored to them.

Google's circumvention of the protection – a system it said was used by other companies – apparently contradicted its online help, which told Safari users they need not do anything to prevent Google monitoring their actions, because the browser's default settings would block Google's cookies.