Google has agreed to pay a fine of $22.5m (£14.4m) for monitoring internet surfers using Apple’s Safari browser who had selected the “do not track” privacy setting.

This fine is the largest ever imposed by the US Federal Trade Commission on a single company.

The penalty has been handed out for misrepresenting what it was doing and not for the methods it was using to bypass Safari’s tracking cookie settings.

As part of the settlement, Google are not required to admit to any wrongdoing.

By default, Safari automatically rejects tracking cookies.  Google were able to get around this block by adding code onto some of its adverts to make the Apple browser think that the user had made an exception for its cookie if they had interacted with the ad.