It looks like Google is in trouble again in regards to its privacy policy as a Dutch regulator has clearly stated the company’s policy is “forbidden by law”.
The company behind the little search engine that could has managed to add another EU country to list of nations it has severely "annoyed" with the way it handles privacy. A number of European countries have launched investigations into Google’s practices and policies and all of them, including the UK and France have found that Google isn’t doing enough to inform users about what data it collects and how it uses it. Now the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) has ended its seven-month investigation and has reached the same conclusion as its European neighbours: Google is supposedly spinning an “invisible web of our personal data without our consent”.
The whole argument began almost two years ago when Google changed its user privacy policy to be able to share your data across all its services. You might remember at the time many people, regulators and a certain software company whom we’re fans of, made a big fuss around this change.
Google has mentioned countless times that it respects European law, and that they are doing everything they can to comply. We’ll see how that goes down in the upcoming DPA hearing when the regulator is looking at “enforcement measures” against the company.