Google misses European data privacy deadline
Three months ago Google was ordered by the French, and other European governments, to make changes to its revised Privacy Policy, which it introduced in March 2012. This allows Google to combine users’ information across multiple Google services. Many users and consumer and privacy groups protested, and a number of European governments ruled that the new policies and practices were illegal with respect to existing laws governing data protection, etc. Now that deadline has expired (see for instance) and it seems that Google has in effect decided to do nothing and to dare the Europeans to work out what to do about it.
Google has said that they’re willing to go on talking (they would, wouldn’t they?) but the French Government has imposed a fine of $203,100. I would guess that that is some kind of round number in Euros but it still seems a rather trifling sum when set against Google’s annual profits of $10.7 billion. It illustrates one of the problems when dealing with today’s Internet giants. Even when Governments are minded to act on behalf of their citizens and try to regulate the operation of the data market, when they are dealing with trans-global companies who are economically as big and powerful, and quite possibly more powerful than the Government attempting to regulate them, then working out how to make those regulations stick is no simple matter.
The EU (well, at least all of the EU governments except for the UK) has clearly decided that the operation of the data market has to be rebalanced with respect to the rights of the individual versus the practices of Internet companies. It will be fascinating to see how the conflict between the likes of Google on the one hand and the assorted European Governments, both collectively and individually, develops. I suspect that there are several more rounds of this particular fight still to be fought.
