Google has been fined 1.1 million euros ($ 1.3 million). French authorities have concluded that the search engine has shown an incorrect ranking for French hotels. Earlier Google used input from other hotel industry websites in its algorithm along with official source Atout France to give hotels a rank of one to five stars.
Google has now made changes
The investigation was launched in 2019 and 2020 by the French government’s fraud and competition agency after complaints from hotel owners about Google’s ranking. He said that his objective was to monitor the truth of the information available at 7,500 institutions through the platform. Google said that it has now made the necessary changes to show only official French star ratings for hotels on Google Maps and Search.
Earlier in December last year, France’s data privacy firm fined Google and Amazon a total of $ 163 million. The watchdog said it had fined Google 100 million euros ($ 12.1 million) and 35 million euros ($ 4.2 million) on Google for allegedly breaking the country’s regulations on advertising cookies. CNIL said in a statement that the French websites of the two companies did not ask Internet users in advance about trackers or cookies, which were automatically saved on computers for the purpose of advertisements.
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At the same time, in December 2019, the Competition Authority of France imposed a fine of 150 million euros, or $ 167 million on Google, for misuse of its dominance in the online advertising market. This was the first fine imposed on Google by authority.