According to a report from the Guardian out today, Google will be told on Tuesday to “unravel” the changes it made to its European privacy policy earlier this year.
As you may know, the company launched a major privacy policy change globally earlier this year. It essentially consolidated a number of policies into one major policy to encompass most of Google’s products. This way, people using various Google products would be under the terms of one major policy, effectively turning these different products into features of a central Google product. Because of this, Google is able to use user data from one service to the next, and personalize the user experience based on that.
According to the Guardian, the CNIL, France’s data protection agency will hold a press conference on Tuesday, to “announce the results of its deliberations together with the data protection chiefs of the other European Union countries.”
Last week, news came out (also from The Guardian) that Google woud come under fire from European data protection commissioners, and it appears that dat is about to come.
It will be interesting to see what exactly comes of this, and what effect it might have on Google’s policy throughout the world.
Google maintains that its policy enables it to build a “better, more intuitive user experience across Google for signed in users.” It’s also important to note that Google’s actual privacy controls did not change.