France fines Google

Earlier I wrote that Spain has fined Google for data breach and now it seems that France went the same way. Because of the privacy breach, France privacy regulators administered a fine and regulated a demand for Google to fulfil. The commity on information and liberty (CNIL) fined Google $200.000 for breaching the regulations of french people concerning privacy. Not only that, but a very emberassing demand for a warning on Google's french page will have to appear. The warning will have to explain that Google does not support the CNIL regulations, and be put on Google.fr main page.

French government fines Google

Of course for such a major company like Google, the fine of $200.000 will not mean much, but the logo saying that CNIL does not support Google by the March 1, 2012 french law may cause some damage to Google's traffic. CNIL stated the the regulations had to be implemented in order to control the users privacy and to inform them of possible data collecting that people are not aware of. CNIL continued to explain that they did not have any problems with Google's information collecting itself. The fine was implemented because Google's policy interfiers with the provisions of the French Data Protection Act.

These are the four points which interfered with the french law:

The company does not sufficiently inform its users of the conditions in which their personal data are processed, nor of the purposes of this processing. They may therefore neither understand the purposes for which their data are collected, which are not specific as the law requires, nor the ambit of the data collected through the different services concerned. Consequently, they are not able to exercise their rights, in particular their right of access, objection or deletion.

The company does not comply with its obligation to obtain user consent prior to the storage of cookies on their terminals.

It fails to define retention periods applicable to the data which it processes.

Finally, it permits itself to combine all the data it collects about its users across all of its services without any legal basis.

The new CNIL regulations are very similar to the ones implemented by Spain and Netherlands on Novemeber and December, last year. The released statement by Google representitives suggested a more neutral position, stating: "We've engaged fully with the CNIL throughout this process to explain our privacy policy and how it allows us to create simpler, more effective services. We'll be reading their report closely to determine next steps," it seems now that the NSA has stirred the whole industry and problems keep troubling to all of the major companies throughout the globe.