France’s privacy watchdog has imposed a €60 million ($63.88 million) fine against Microsoft’s Ireland subsidiary for dropping advertising cookies in users’ computers without their explicit consent in violation of data protection laws in the European Union.

The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) noted that users visiting the home page of its Bing search engine did not have a “mechanism to refuse cookies as easily as accepting them.”

The authority, which carried out an online audit between September 2020 and May 2021 following a complaint it received in February 2020, stated the tech giant deposited cookies with an aim to serve ads and fight advertising fraud without getting a user’s permission beforehand, as is required by law.