France: Announced CNIL investigation into CRITEO compliance with GDPR obligation to obtain user consent for collecting and processing data

On 27 December 2019, the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) instructed the Secretary-General to carry out a verification mission of the processing operations implemented by the company CRITEO. The CNIL started an investigation after complaints were filed by Privacy International and None of Your Business. CRITEO is a company specialising in behavioural retargeting and personalised advertising and tracks the browsing habits of internet users through a tracker (cookie) placed on their devices when they visit certain partner websites. This data is analysed to determine which personalised advertisements to display to users.