6 European Countries to Investigate Google’s Privacy Policy

Google may face legal action from six European countries for not complying with a request to change its privacy policy that violates the European data protection law, CNet reports.

Google consolidated over 70 privacy policies to form a single one that collated data on individuals from across all its services like Blogger, Google+, Search and YouTube. Google announced the policy January last year and brought it into effect March, 2012. Since then the web giant has faced criticism for not meeting the requirements of the European Law on Data Protection.

The Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL), France's data protection authority, said that the new policy was reviewed by Article 29 Working Party from March till October, 2012, and after realizing that Google's policy did not meet the requirements of the European Data Protection Directive, a four month grace period was offered to the web search company to amend the policy.

CNIL said that Google did not implement "significant compliance measures" to amend its policy in the given time, which has forced the regulators to initiate an investigation against Google. Watchdogs from six European countries including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K will be investigating Google.

The officials from all six countries met Google officials 19 March, 2013, to discuss the matter, CNIL said that "no change has been seen" since the meet. The data protection authority said that further investigations will be carried out based on the Article 29 Working Party's analysis.

"Consequently, all the authorities composing the taskforce have launched actions on 2 April 2013 on the basis of the provisions laid down in their respective national legislation (investigations, inspections, etc.)" the statement continued.

Google has been notified of the investigation procedure and "an international administrative cooperation procedure with its counterparts in the taskforce."

Google spokesperson told CNet in a statement that its privacy policy does not violate the European Law and "allows us to create simpler, more effective services." The company worked with data protection authorities to ensure no such breach would take place and the same will be followed in the future, the spokesperson added.

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