French telecom Orange fined 50 million euros for inserting ads in inboxes

Displaying ads between emails in users’ inboxes without consent can be costly. The French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) has fined telecommunications operator Orange 50 million euros for doing just that.

Orange provides its customers with an email service called “Mail Orange.” However, the French authorities discovered that the company was displaying ads “in the form of emails among genuine emails in its users’ inboxes.”

The French Post and Electronic Communications Code requires companies to obtain user consent before displaying such ads.

“The CNIL considered that these messages promoting services or goods, which were not sent by one user to another, but posted in a space normally reserved for private emails and which looked like genuine emails,” the authority said.

“The company had control over the advertisements in question, by displaying and selling these dedicated spaces to advertisers.”

The CNIL's investigations also unveiled that Orange continued to read stored cookies on user devices, even when the users of the orange.fr website withdrew their consent to the storage and reading of cookies.

CNIL is also giving Orange three months to stop reading user cookies after they withdraw consent. The company risks a fine of 100,000 euros per day overdue.

“The amount of this fine was decided on the basis of the very high number of people concerned (over 7.8 million people having seen the advertisements in question in their inboxes), as well as the company's market position as France's leading telecommunications operator,” the CNIL said.

European courts previously ruled that email service providers, including Gmail, cannot simply display ads in users' inboxes as the practice is reminiscent of spam and requires explicit informed consent in accordance with the GDPR, heise.de explains.