The European Union is to investigate changes to Google’s privacy policy which took effect today.
In a letter to the company, CNIL, the French data regulator 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.’
You may not have noticed, particularly if you’ve been steadfastly ignoring that little yellow box which has shown-up on Google services over the last few weeks, but significant changes to the Internet giant’s privacy terms and conditions have now come into effect.
Those changes mean that instead of the Google maintaining separate pools of data about you for each service, it will combine them and use what it knows about your email messages, for example, to decide how to deliver search results to you and which adverts to show you. It only collects the information when you’re logged in however, and you can exercise a degree of control over what it collects and stores by heading to Google Dashboard, signing in and clicking Manage account and turning off Web History.
Politicians in Japan and the US have also expressed concern over the changes and campaigners have argued that users are being railroaded into accepting them.
