France and Spain Thursday led a Europe-wide legal action against the giant global internet company Google over breach of privacy following the National Security Agency's surveillance program leaks.
The legal action against the world's No. 1 search engine comes weeks after Edward Snowden, a former CIA staff, leaked the fact that the U.S. National Security Agency secretly gathered user data from nine major global companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others as a part of monitoring movements and communications of people.
Saying Google had broken the French law over the privacy policies, France's data protection watchdog (CNIL) gave a dead-line of three-month for the giant global internet company to change its privacy policies or else give a fine of up to €150,000 euros ($200,000), according to the Voice of America.
Likewise, Spain's Data Protection Agency (AEPD) said that Google made five violations of law and would be fined between €40,000($53,000) and €300,000 ($400,000)for each of the five violations of the law.
France's data protection watchdog has been leading Europe's inquiry soon after the search engine launched its consolidated privacy policy in March 2012.
According to the CNIL, Britain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands will be following in the footsteps of Spain and France and Google is likely to face fines totaling several million euros.
"By the end of July, all the authorities within the [EU data protection] task force will have taken coercive action against Google," said Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, president of the CNIL.
Following the NSA leaks, European citizens and leading politicians have expressed outrage over the NSA surveillance programs, saying that they have no legal rights to protect themselves from such spying.
"There is a mass of personal information floating about on people in the Google galaxy that people are not even aware of," said Falque-Pierrotin. "All we are saying to Google is that we would like it to lift the veil a little on what it's doing."
The NSA whistleblower is currently hiding in Hong Kong and WikiLeaks advocates in Iceland say they are working on granting him asylum in the Nordic country.
"We are in touch with Mr. Snowden's legal team and are in the process of brokering his asylum in Iceland," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told the New York Times Wednesday.
