7 million euros in fines for Fnac Darty, accused of having illegally collected data on its customers

Two companies from the Fnac Darty group have been fined a total of 7 million euros for non-compliance with cookie legislation, the data protection authority (Cnil) announced in a press release on Thursday.

The CNIL criticizes companies for using trackers, also called “cookies”, on the Fnac mobile application, without requesting user consent. These trackers made it possible to collect “in particular their browsing history in order to display product recommendations to them and to train its recommendation algorithm,” said the CNIL.

The authority sanctioned the group's holding company with a fine of 6 million euros, and one of its subsidiaries, Fnac Direct, mainly responsible for operating the Fnac site and its mobile application, with a fine of one million euros. According to the authority, this amount is justified “by the companies' lack of awareness of the choice expressed by the user not to consent to the tracking of their navigation in the mobile application, as well as by the fact that this application is used by a large number of people”. The two fines were accompanied by an injunction to comply with the law within one month, and a penalty of 10,000 euros per day of delay.

Also read Daniel Kretinsky encourages Fnac Darty to launch a takeover bid for a group controlled by Xavier Niel

Reinforced control

The CNIL also recalls the “constant repressive doctrine” applied to cookies. These trackers, essential to the online advertising sector and integrated into the economic model of many platforms, have been the subject of reinforced control carried out by the French authority for several years. In 2025, it imposed two major sanctions on the American group Google (325 million euros) and the Asian group Shein (150 million euros) for non-compliance with the legislation on cookies.