presence
10-15-2012, 08:49 PM
European Union officials have asked Google to rework its recently overhauled privacy policy in order to better protect users' rights. It follows a France-led probe into the legality of the Internet giant's policies.
The letter from 24 of 27 of the bloc's data protection regulators, which was made public after being obtained by Reuters prior to its official announcement Tuesday, follows a running investigation opened by France this spring into the legality of Google's method of collecting user data. Introduced in March, the company's new guidelines consolidated 60 separate privacy policies into one and collate user data from across Google's services, which include Gmail and YouTube.
EU regulators included a list of 12 "practical recommendations" that would bring Google's privacy policy and data collection closer to European legal norms. The suggestions are reported to center on the automatic collection of personal data ranging from browsing histories, to real-time location, to credit card details.
Brussels stopped short of calling Google's corporate practices illegal, but said, "Combining personal data on such a large scale creates high risks to the privacy of users,"
http://rt.com/news/eu-google-privacy-policy-516/
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-15/google-rebuked-by-eu-privacy-watchdogs-over-data-protection (http://rt.com/news/eu-google-privacy-policy-516/)
The letter from 24 of 27 of the bloc's data protection regulators, which was made public after being obtained by Reuters prior to its official announcement Tuesday, follows a running investigation opened by France this spring into the legality of Google's method of collecting user data. Introduced in March, the company's new guidelines consolidated 60 separate privacy policies into one and collate user data from across Google's services, which include Gmail and YouTube.
EU regulators included a list of 12 "practical recommendations" that would bring Google's privacy policy and data collection closer to European legal norms. The suggestions are reported to center on the automatic collection of personal data ranging from browsing histories, to real-time location, to credit card details.
Brussels stopped short of calling Google's corporate practices illegal, but said, "Combining personal data on such a large scale creates high risks to the privacy of users,"
http://rt.com/news/eu-google-privacy-policy-516/
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-15/google-rebuked-by-eu-privacy-watchdogs-over-data-protection (http://rt.com/news/eu-google-privacy-policy-516/)