Although Google claims its new Privacy Policy helps simplify privacy, the EU claims otherwise and specifically that the new Privacy Policy “makes it impossible to understand which purposes, personal data, recipients or access rights are relevant to the use of a specific service.”  

The EU gave the lead to investigate Google’s new Privacy Policy to the French Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL). CNIL states that it “is responsible for ensuring that information technology remains at the service of citizens, and does not jeopardize human identity or breach human rights, privacy or individual or public liberties.”  

On February 27, 2012 CNIL sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page (which was follow-up to a February 3rd letter) complaining that Google failed to properly consult EU authorities about the new Google Privacy Policies and that the:

…preliminary analysis shows that Google’s new policy does not meet the requirements of the European Directive of Data Protection (95/46/CE), especially regarding information provided to data subject.  

The CNIL highlighted the significance of Google’s penetration in the EU with the following statistics about Google’s usage: 

-more than 80% of the European search engine market,
-around 30% of the European smartphones market,
-40% of the global online video market and
-more than 40% of the global online advertisement market

Apparently Google has chosen to ignore the EU’s warnings and surely we will see more headlines soon.

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