FACEBOOK IRELAND LIMITED

CNIL (France) case SAN-2021-024, decided 2021-12-31. EUR 60,000,000.

What the regulator decided

Facebook deposited cookies on the terminals of users visiting facebook.com without their prior consent and offered no equivalent "refuse" option alongside the "accept" option at the first interaction; users had to click through to a secondary panel to refuse, breaching the freely-given and equivalent-refusal limbs of Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act.

Primary source

Regulator-owned URL. Quote this in legal briefs and academic citations.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/cnil/id/CNILTEXT000044840532

Archived snapshot

Wayback Machine snapshot of the primary source. Use this when the regulator URL might be refactored or expire.

https://web.archive.org/web/20241111172550/https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/cnil/id/CNILTEXT000044840532

ConsentMark interpretation

Operator-readable note on how this case shapes the ConsentMark scanner narrative. Not a legal opinion; cites the primary source.

Issued the same day as SAN-2021-023 (Google EUR 150M) under the same factual pattern. Cite for the principle that "accept in one click, refuse in several clicks" is itself the violation - the CNIL does not require that no consent be obtained, only that the path to refusal match the path to acceptance.

Verification trail

Verified by: donal
Verified at: 2026-05-27
Review due: 2026-11-27

Cite this case

Pick the format that matches where you are pasting. The methodology version is preserved in every variant so the citation stays verifiable after future methodology changes.

BibTeX

@misc{consentmark-precedent-cnil-san-2021-024,
  author       = {{ConsentMark}},
  year         = {2021},
  title        = {CNIL (France) SAN-2021-024 - FACEBOOK IRELAND LIMITED},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.consentmark.com/precedent/cnil-san-2021-024}},
  note         = {ConsentMark methodology v1.3}
}

APA

ConsentMark. (2021, December 31). CNIL (France) SAN-2021-024 - FACEBOOK IRELAND LIMITED. Methodology v1.3. https://www.consentmark.com/precedent/cnil-san-2021-024

Markdown

[CNIL (France) SAN-2021-024 - FACEBOOK IRELAND LIMITED - ConsentMark](https://www.consentmark.com/precedent/cnil-san-2021-024)

Plain text

CNIL (France) SAN-2021-024 - FACEBOOK IRELAND LIMITED - ConsentMark, 2021-12-31, methodology v1.3, https://www.consentmark.com/precedent/cnil-san-2021-024