Verizon fined $1.35 mn for supercookie

Verizon has been fined $1.35 million over its supercookie that the US government said followed phone customers on the internet without their permission. The company would also need to get an explicit ''yes'' from customers willing to be tracked.

The supercookies were named as such as they were hard, or near-impossible, to block. The cookies helped deliver targeted ads to cellphone customers for Verizon. The company is looking to expand its advertising and media business and bought AOL for its digital ad technology in 2015.

According to the Federal Communications Commission, it found that Verizon started using the supercookies with consumers in December 2012, though it did not disclose the program until October 2014. The company updated its privacy policy to disclose the trackers in March 2015 and gave people an option to opt out.

According to the FCC settlement, consumers now needed to opt in to let Verizon share data with a third party. However, for data-collection and sharing within Verizon itself, the company could choose to have customers either opt in or automatically do it and give consumers the option to stop it, a less stringent requirement.

Though the penalty was small, the enforcement action sent the message to the industry of the FCC's expanding reach into privacy regulation. The agency was expected to soon consider first-time privacy rules for internet service providers that could include mandates that wireless and fixed broadband providers obtain permissions from users before tracking their behavior online.