Italian watchdog gives Google 18-month data use ultimatum

Nieuws Breedband Italië 22 JUL 2014
Italian watchdog gives Google 18-month data use ultimatum
Italy’s data protection authority, Garante Privacy, has announced that Google continues to breach Italian law on the gathering and use of personal information on customers without their permission and has given the company 18 months to change its practice. The ultimatum follows a year-long investigation and is part of a similar probe by the French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch regulators, who have worked together to investigate the company's practices since it begun collecting and sharing personal data across a variety of its services for profiling purposes without giving users the means to opt out. Although the Italian watchdog acknowledged that Google had taken steps to comply with local law, the information it gave users on how their data was being treated and stored remained inadequate. 

As part of the 18-month process to remedy the situation, Google has been ordered to submit a document by 30 September setting out a roadmap of the steps it intends to take to comply with the regulator's decision, which will become binding once signed. These include the need to explicitly inform users that the profiling is being done for commercial purposes, obtaining their valid consent for each specific Google service (be it Gmail, YouTube, Google+ and others), and giving them the option to have their personal data deleted within two months.

A spokesman for Google said the company had always cooperated with the regulator and would continue to do so. However, the regulator did not make any specific statements regarding the 'right to be forgotten' rule, which gives individuals the right to request the removal of information about them from search results, preferring to wait and see how the EU Court of Justice’s judgment is applied.

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Internet

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Google

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Italië

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