German Data Protection Authority Challenges Google
November 5, 2014
Well, this is interesting. The Inquirer reports that the Germans are taking a stand against Google’s practice of consolidating users’ Web-wide data in, “Germany Tells Google to Pause for Permission Before Profiling People.” The Hamburg Data Protection Authority has a particular problem with Google’s one-privacy-policy-fits-all-countries stance. For its part, Google continues to assert that the “simpler, more effective services” it can provide by pulling the threads of our online presences are worth the privacy tradeoff. I’m sure the increased ad revenue is just a nice side-effect.
Reporter Dave Neal quotes Johannes Caspar, the Hamburg commissioner of data protection and freedom:
“On the substantial issue of combining user data across services, Google has not been willing to abide to the legally binding rules and refused to substantially improve the user’s controls. So we had to compel Google to do so by an administrative order. Our requirements aim at a fair balance between the concerns of the company and its users. The issue is up to Google now. The company must treat the data of its millions of users in a way that respects their privacy adequately while they use the various services of the company.”
I suppose we’ll see about that. What will be the next step in the struggle between Google and the world’s privacy advocates?
Cynthia Murrell, November 05, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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