EU says Google privacy policy likely violating law
updated 11:00 am EST, Thu March 1, 2012
Google unified policies may run afoul of EU rules
European Commission official Viviane Reding in an interview with the BBC's Radio 4 on Thursday said that Google's newly in-effect unified privacy policy was so far determined to be violating EU laws. Those managing data rights in the EU believed Google was breaking terms requiring that it be transparent on how the data would be used. Data was being handed over to third parties in a way that Google account holders hadn't agreed to, she said.
Despite having initially complimented Google, Reding believed that Google wouldn't have even been able to propose its new privacy approach under new data protection rules that had appeared just a day after Google's notice. Under the EU terms, users have to be clearly told what will happen to their data.
The EU hadn't been consulted, Reding added. Google may have antagonized the Commission after it refused to freeze its policy implementation to verify whether it was legal under EU laws.
Google has argued that its new approach, which consolidates 60 of its 70 total policies into one. While meant to give users an easier-to-understand notion of what they're agreeing to, concerns have existed that it was takign control out of users' hands and sharing information in one service with another while not giving consent. Google has said control remains for individual services, but its approach is still mostly all-or-nothing and makes it difficult to only agree to use for one service. [via Reuters]
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Nov 2009
Straight from the Facebook playbook
Unilaterally changing your privacy settings without your approval. They think telling you about it in advanced is enough. It's not. The burden is still on you to prevent it, if you can prevent it at all which is not clear.
Instead, what they should do is redirect all users who log into Google account to a webpage which asks:
Do you want to merge all your google personal information across all the different Google services you use? Yes or No.
If not, check which ones you wish to merge.
It's that simple. But will they do it? Noooooooooo.