On Thursday, Google"s newly revamped privacy polices went into effect officially across Google"s online services. However, it looks like Google"s changes will have to face a very unhappy European Union. Reuters reports that the EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding announced that Google"s new policies are in fact violating European law.
Reding said there were a number of issues with Google"s privacy statements. She said:
One is that nobody had been consulted, it is not in accordance with the law on transparency and it utilizes the data of private persons in order to hand it over to third parties, which is not what the users have agreed to.
In addition, French regulator the CNIL has already given notice to Google that it plans to lead a investigation into its new policies.
The changes were first announced by Google in late January. Google has repeatedly claimed that the changes are just a way to consolidate privacy policies so that all of its services, including Gmail, YouTube, and Google+, are now covered by one set of rules.
In a post on Google"s official blog post on Thursday, the company said:
The new policy doesn’t change any existing privacy settings or how any personal information is shared outside of Google. We aren’t collecting any new or additional information about users. We won’t be selling your personal data. And we will continue to employ industry-leading security to keep your information safe.