The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique, a French data-protection watchdog, announced on Tuesday that it will decide in June if Google broke European privacy laws when it consolidated 60 privacy policies into one earlier this year, Reuters reports.
The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique, a French data-protection watchdog, announced on Tuesday that it will decide in June if Google broke European privacy laws when it consolidated 60 privacy policies into one earlier this year, Reuters reports.
The change allowed Google to consolidate information about their users from their search history, Gmail, YouTube and Google+ accounts. The change allows for personal information from Google+ accounts to appear in Google search results, and ultimately leads to better targeting by internet advertisers. Google says the change in privacy policies ensures better search results and a more streamlined user experience.
The CNIL review could lead to financial penalties of up to 300,000 euros and could potentially saddle the company with administrative sanctions.
Late Monday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google is close to paying out $22.5 million to the U.S federal Trade Commission for bypassing privacy settings on Safari web browsers. In February of 2012, the Journal reported that Google’s used a special computer code to trick Safari’s software into monitoring users with web cookies after users had specifically changed their privacy settings to block web monitoring.
Although 22.5 million would be the largest financial penalty ever levied on a single company by the FTC, the amount would be relatively insignificant to Google corp. In 2011, the web giant took in an average revenue of $22.5 million every five hours.