France fines Fnac €7m for recommendation tracking after users refused.
France's data protection authority, the CNIL, has fined two Fnac Darty companies a combined €7m because the Fnac app kept sending shoppers' browsing data to a recommendation service after they declined tracking. The decision treats personalised recommendations as commercial targeting that needs consent.
According to PPC Land's reading of decision SAN-2026-015, adopted on 22 October and published on 29 October, Fnac Darty Participations et Services was fined €6m and Fnac Direct €1m. CNIL inspectors tested the app in March 2024, clicked "Continue without accepting" on its banner and saw requests carrying a Fnac user ID and products viewed go to an outside domain. Both companies must prove compliance within a month of notification or pay €10,000 a day. The case started with a complaint from the privacy group noyb in September 2023.
Fnac argued that recommendations were like store aisles and strictly necessary for the service. The CNIL disagreed for three of the four uses: personalised products, complementary products and training the recommendation algorithm all count as commercial targeting. It accepted that showing similar products after a search could in principle be exempt, but because one tracker served all four purposes, the whole tracker needed consent. The app had 37,400 daily users on average and more than 1.5 million French downloads over a year.
Fnac switched off the old tool in December 2024 and says its replacement separates consented personalisation from tracker-free suggestions, but the CNIL found it had not shown this was in place. The vendor's name and the rapporteur's proposed fine are redacted, and the companies can appeal to the Council of State within two months.
This is French law, but the reasoning matters to Gulf retailers and apps that serve European customers or copy European consent set-ups. Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law also rests on consent for many uses. Any brand whose app or site uses one vendor tag for both recommendations and model training should check whether a refusal on its banner actually stops the data flowing.
Why it matters
The regulator classed personalised product recommendations as commercial targeting that needs consent, a ruling that reaches any retailer feeding suggestions from browsing history.
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