Google fined $22m for tracking Apple users without permission

While PC users are warm and fuzzy with the idea that they are tracked all over the web, pretty much all the time, Apple users seem to have a much higher expectation of privacy. Google circumvented the Apple users' choice to remain anonymous and, now, will pay the $22.5m price. KitGuru fixes a tin foil hat in place before investigating.

If you use a PC to surf the web, then you expect your system to be tracked here, there and everywhere with a variety of cookies and other devices. The recent spate of sites using pop ups to tell you that ‘cookies are being used' was surprising, because you could not imagine that they weren't being used.

It's a bit like cars being delivered with warning stickers saying, “I use petrol – is that OK?”

Apple's default posture with its Safari browser, is to reject cookies unless the customer says that it is OK.

Google cheated its way past this requirement for ‘Permission to install a cookie behind your back on Safari', by coding advert to say “Any kind of interaction with this advert is a ‘Yes' vote for cookies going forward”. The reason for it circumventing the cookie ban is that it needed cookie permission to implement certain features of its ‘Google +' social network.

Essentially, the ability to ‘Like' something with Google needs a cookie. No cookie, no like. Which is a problem when people no like cookies.

Who actually benefits from the 22,500,000 dollar bills was unclear.

KitGuru says: To think that we're not going to be tracked, every minute of every hour of every day – for the whole of our lives – is naive. Echoing the sentiments of Whitney Houston, it's not right but it's OK – at least for most people. We, as a people, seem to have lost the previous generation's need to live individual lives. Our obsession with the web, celebrity and constant communication is ensuring that we live in an ever more constrictive web of our own construction going forward.

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