Spain punishes Google for data breach

It seems that the National Security Agency scandal on data security has brought world-wide chaos in the data security sector. NSA is not the only ones paying for the breach of security. Google has now been fined by the Spainish government's data protection agency because of three possible national protection law brakings. The difference between the accident with the NSA is that Google did actually acknowledge the users about data collecting, but did not inform about the extent and the ways the collected data will be used.

The Spanish data protection agency released the statement where it said that: "Google unlawfully collects and processes personal information, engaged fully with the Spanish data protection agency throughout this process to explain our privacy policy and how it allows us to create simpler, more effective services, and we'll continue to do so". The fine of $1.23 million should cause little trouble to such a giant like Google, but the idea that more and more countries begin their fight for users privacy, should raise awareness. Google users data are typacilly stored in the cloud system where nobody really knows how it is limited, collected or used. The personal information then is limited for users to view, making them unsure of what the Google actually knows and can use.

Google vs. privacy

Another point of view in the on-going situation is the different countries fight (or advertisement of the fight) against data collecting organizations such as NSA and Google. Spain's government used the oppurtinity to raise it's political rankings by advertising their fight for people privacy against the large organizations like Google. The cloud platform entered the market in March, 2012 were it allowed Google to track it's users e-mail's, search tendencies, youtube and other features. It looks like Google could be in a lot of trouble if this kind of information would get world-wide recognition. Last week, the Dutch government released the statement that Google is illegally tracing it's citizen's personal data and could face sanctions. France and U.K. are also expected to fine and enforce limitation to Google's data search.