The Verge - Google to streamline privacy policies on March 1st: the backlash and response

Google braces for fines in Europe over privacy policy

2013-04-02T11:53:57Z

After a lengthy investigation, the French independent administrative authority CNIL has advised EU countries to take action against Google over its privacy policy. In a press release today, CNIL said that Google has failed to respond to its requests to modify the policy, and the watchdog passing the matter over to member states to deal with accordingly. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands were all involved in the investigation, and It's now up to regulators in each country to look into the matter and decide what action to take.

A spokesperson for the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) told us that it is launching a new investigation following on from CNIL's. The purpose of the investigation is to establish...

Google will face further scrutiny from EU regulators over 2012 privacy policy changes

2013-02-18T22:12:48Z

The European Union first expressed concern about Google's new privacy policy last February, and now, more than a year later, Reuters reports that EU regulators are preparing to take action against the company this summer. Last October, after a probe into Google's new privacy policy, regulators urged the company to revise its policy in order to comply with data protection laws. Regulators were not pleased with Google's response.

EU regulators gave Google four months to change its policies last October, and the French privacy regulator leading the EU's investigation said that the company "did not provide any precise and effective answers." Reuters reports that the EU's action this year will begin with the creation of a working group to...

EU regulators say Google must revise its privacy policy

2012-10-16T15:43:05Z

EU regulators have urged Google to implement changes to the way it handles user data. CNiL, an independent French watchdog concerned with data protection, today revealed the results of a probe into Google's much-maligned unified privacy policy at the same time as publishing an open letter to Google CEO Larry Page. The watchdog, which undertook the investigation on the behalf of the European Union, explained that its issues stem from Google providing its users with "incomplete or approximate information" on data collection and combination. It identified eight purposes that Google combines user data for:

The provision of services where the user requests the combination of data e.g. Contacts & Gmail (case 1)

The provision of services...

Is Google Drive worse for privacy than iCloud, Skydrive, and Dropbox?

2012-04-25T15:09:11Z

The Google Drive cloud storage service launched yesterday to much fanfare, but as with any new Google product, there are important questions about how the company will actually use personal data uploaded to the system. Google sells ads against your data, after all, and the more data you give the company, the more opportunity it has to screw up. That means the Google Drive terms of service and privacy policy are critically important, and there's been a lot of selective interpretation floating around the web in the past 24 hours — and a lot of comparisons to the privacy policies of competitive services like Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive.

That's great — all web services should be subject to harsh scrutiny of their privacy policies...

Google responds to EU privacy policy questions, pausing rollout would have 'proved confusing'

2012-04-05T22:22:12Z

The European Union's concerns over Google's new privacy policy have led to a France-led investigation into the changes, and now Google has responded to the first volley of questioning into the matter. In a letter to France's National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties (CNIL), the company addresses 24 of the 69 questions it was asked in a March 16th letter from the body, stating that the company has "worked hard" to provide a policy that is easily understood by users, and that if the body looks beyond the Privacy Policy alone, Google's products in total follow "the requirements of European data protection laws." Google points to several examples, such as the sharing-disabled default settings of Google+, and the informative...

EU claims new Google privacy policy breaks European law

2012-03-01T18:09:01Z

The European Union launched a France-led investigation into Google's new privacy policy in February, and now that the policy has rolled out EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding says it breaches the union's law. Reding told the BBC that "the new rules are not in accordance with the European law, and that the transparency rules have not been applied," adding that another issue is that "nobody had been consulted" about the changes. Google responded indirectly on its official blog, stating that the policy — which consolidates 60 different privacy policies for various Google products into one — actually makes things clearer and simpler.

Google also explained that the company has "undertaken the most extensive user education campaign in...

Google's controversial new privacy policy now in effect

2012-03-01T14:18:57Z

Google's new privacy policy is going into effect today, despite widespread criticism that saw the company release an ad campaign in order to win public support for the changes. Among those critical of the new policy have been EU investigators, who claim they weren't adequately briefed of Google's changes; the chairman of the FTC, who called the new policy "a fairly binary and somewhat brutal choice;" and even 36 US attorneys general, who jointly sent a letter to the company expressing their concerns. Another not-unexpected critic has been Microsoft, although Google has been quick to counter — when Microsoft announced plans to run a series of newspaper advertisements critical of Google's new policy last month, the company responded the...

Google's new privacy policy under fire from EU investigators

2012-02-29T08:49:04Z

The French government has requested that Google delay the launch of its new privacy policy just two days before it's scheduled to take effect. After being selected to head the European Union's investigation into the legality of the new privacy policy, France's National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties (CNIL) has sent an open letter to Google CEO Larry Page outlining the EU's concerns. In it, the CNIL wrote that the new policy "does not meet the requirements of the European Directive on Data Protection, especially regarding the information provided to data subjects." The French authority is particularly concerned with two points: Google's lack of transparency when it comes to what information is being collected and why, and...