Verizon is set to pay $1.35 million fine over its "supercookie" that the government claimed followed phone clients on the Internet without their consent. Verizon will also have to get an open answer of "yes" for some kinds of tracking.
According to ABC NEWS, the Federal Communications Commission stated on Monday that it discovered that Verizon began using the supercookies with customers in December 2012, but did not divulge any detail of the program until October 2014. Verizon made an update of its privacy policy to disclose the trackers in March 2015 and gave their consumers an option to decide.
The supercookies started out its name since they were hard, or near-impossible to block. Verizon utilizes supercookies to deliver targeted ads to cellphone customers. Since the company wanted to extend its advertising and media business, as well as brought AOL for its digital and technological in 2015, they started using supercookies.
CNBC reported that the FCC settlement with Verizon will allow consumers to opt in to let Verizon share their data with a third party. However, for data-gathering and sharing within Verizon itself, the company can decide to have clients either opt in or automatically do it and give their customers the choice to stop it. This will allegedly be a less strict requirement.
Moreover, Nate Cardozo, which is a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog that had been critical of the supercookies, expressed his concern that the settlement was an "unqualifies win" for the clients. "Today's order will mean that other companies contemplating similar involuntary tracking will think twice before proceeding without explicit consumer consent," he wrote in an email via Nzherald.
Meanwhile, the New York company has also made its move to change some of its practices, since a lot of critics considered it as most invasive. In fact, in an emailed statement, the company stated that the FCC agreement with Verizon identifies that it already had made adjustments to its ad programs, as they now give more options for consumers.
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