LES PUBLICATIONS CONDE NAST – €750,000 Fine (France, 2025)

The company LES PUBLICATIONS CONDE NAST (the “controller”) publishes printed and online magazines, including the magazine Vanity Fair. Vanityfair.fr received more than 6 million visitors in France between June and October 2023. In December 2019, a data subject represented by noyb filed a complaint with the French DPA concerning the cookies placed on the devices of users visiting the “vanityfair.fr” website. After several investigations and discussions with the DPA, the controller received, in September 2021, an order to obtain user consent before placing optional cookies, and the proceedings were closed in July 2022. Following later complaints by the data subject in July and November 2023, and a request for a new investigation by the rapporteur in 2025, the DPA carried out further online investigations on the “vanityfair.fr” website, to check its compliance with the GDPR and the French Data Protection Act. The DPA first determined the controllership and considered that the company acted as a controller pursuant Article 4(7) GDPR regarding the cookies placed and read on the terminal of users of the https://www.vanityfair.fr website. The DPA recalled that the rules regarding cookies and other trackers on terminal equipment used in the European Union are set out in Article 5(3) of e-Privacy Directive 2002/58/EC and were transposed into French law in Article 82 since the revision of the Data Protection Act in 2018. The DPA sanctioned several cookies practices by the controller that were contrary to Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act. Under this article, the provider was required to ask consent of data subjects if it read/wrote information on the user’s device. There are, however, two exceptions to this consent requirement. No consent was required if the sole purpose of the identifier was to facilitate communication by electronic means or when the identifier was strictly necessary for the provision of an online communication service at the user's request. If