EU launches inquiry into Google privacy changes
A change in Google’s privacy policy, introduced today, has prompted EU authorities to instigate an investigation into whether the firms pooling of data breaches European law.
The investigation is being led by France’s data protection watchdog, CNIL, in an attempt to determine whether marrying individual user data from separate Google owned sites; such as YouTube, Gmail and Google+, breaches any laws.
Google believes a combined store of information would allow it to better tailor search results and allow it to target individuals with custom advertising.
Subscription to the new privacy policy, which supplants 60 previous separate sets of rules, is mandatory for all Google users.
In a letter to Google CNIL wrote: “The CNIL and EU data authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services: they have strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing and its compliance with European data protection legislation.”