The search giant had been warned by the European Union about its move to "simplify privacy," in which it combined its users' data across all of its services such as GMail, YouTube and Google+. At the time, the European Union gave Google four months to rethink its actions, but the deadline came and passed.
Now, individual states within the EU are starting their own actions against Google.
Spain's Data Protection Agency claims to have identified evidence of five serious privacy laws breaches, including a disproportionate use of private data, diverting private data for other uses, storing private data for excessive or undetermined periods, failure to handle private data in a legitimate way and obstructing users in the exercise of their rights.
The French National Commission on Computing and Freedom (CNIL) also wants Google to explain what it is using personal data for, and how long it is held by the company.
These latest actions join similar probes into alleged privacy violations by Google, being carried out in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.
Separately, Google is the target of an anti-trust case from the European Commission for allegedly abusing its position as a search market leader against competitors, and its Android mobile operating system is the subject of a probe by the commission seeking to determine if Google is abusing its position in the smartphone and tablet market to promote its own other Internet services.
It also had to settle a case in France that questioned whether Google should be paying news outlets for linking to their content, and this week was given 35 days to delete data it accidentally collected from unsecured Wi-Fi networks in the UK.
Written by: James Delahunty @ 22 Jun 2013 4:34
