Google's Privacy Laws and Europe Controversy

Google’s Privacy Laws and Europe Controversy

Google has been going through many changes lately as anyone who runs a website or who uses the web a lot will note. There’s Google Plus of course, there’s the ‘Panda’ and ‘Penguin’ algorithm updates and there’s ‘semantic search’ being integrated into the search engine. Someone might reasonably lead to believe in fact that Google has a plan and that they’re going somewhere with all these changes, and it seems that part of their overarching goal involves collecting and storing more data about us than ever before.

In fact on March 1^st Google announced new changes to its privacy policy that indeed suggest as much, and sparked controversy lead by the EU. The EU which has stricter privacy laws than most felt that the idea of keeping information on individuals for up to two years was troubling and wrote a letter to Google asking if they had fulfilled all requirements regarding EU data protection laws.

Google’s Privacy Laws and Europe Controversy

The main thrust behind Google’s privacy policy changes is to allow Google to keep and share information between its services, and the idea is that something you searched for a year ago, or posted on Google+ yesterday might affect the videos shown to you on YouTube (and a cynic would say more likely the adverts shown to you through AdSense). This is something that not everyone would necessarily be comfortable with of course. Probes are even questioning whether Google may be gathering information from online chats.

In response to the letter from the EU Google has stated that it agrees the privacy policy is too ‘vague’ and that it is constantly working to improve it. Subsequent changes have been generally met positively, but the investigation is on going.

But that’s not all…

But that’s not the only thing that Google is coming under fire for from Europe. Meanwhile the European commission’s head of competition policy Joaquin Almunia has contacted Google over concerns of market monopoly. In Europe Google serves around 90% of searches which the commission fear could be harming competition. The concern is that some of the changes Google has made to its policies and its services could be seen as ‘taking advantage’ of that monopoly (by for instance favoring Google+ results over Facebook results in the SERPs, and sometimes favoring its own vertical search services for things like shopping and news). The letter has threatened court action in lieu of cooperation.

Google pointed out in a response published in the Guardian that the internet is ‘disruptive by nature’. As a free service of course users are free to go elsewhere, but the reality is that Google provides by far the best search service.

So what do you think? Is Google abusing its position? Is it right for the European Commission to get involved? It’s time to vote with your search choices people!