Remember last year when Google had to pay $22.5 million to the Federal Trade Commission after bypassing security settings on the Safari browser in order to plant cookies? Computerworld reports that Google will be forking over an additional $17 million after settling with 37 states and the District of Columbia. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced on his website that the state of New York will receive $899,580 of the settlement.
“We work hard to get privacy right at Google and have taken steps to remove the ad cookies, which collected no personal information, from Apple’s browsers,” said a Google spokeswoman.
The terms of the settlement state that Google will not only remove the cookies and pay handsomely for the intrusion, but also that the search engine “shall not employ HTTP Form POST functionality that uses javascript to submit a form without affirmative user action.”
Google will also be launching a Cookie Page that will explain to users exactly what cookies are, what they do, and how to disable them if the user so chooses.
