Policy Observatory

On November Article 29 Working Party published guidelines on the implementation of the Google vs Spain case. In May, the European Court of Justice ruled that private individuals in Europe have the right to request search engines to de-index specific URLs containing their name.

Right now, European citizens do not have the right to challenge misuse of their data by the US government in US courts -- even though American citizens already enjoy this right in most European countries. It’s why Google supports legislation to extend the US Privacy Act to EU citizens. The Obama Administration has already pledged its support for this change and we look forward to to working with Congress to try and make this happen.

Dutch News reports that the national privacy watchdog CBP is threatening Google with a fine of up to €15m for contravening Dutch privacy legislation. Since 2012, Google has been combining information about users from Gmail, Google maps, YouTube and search results into a single profile. However, the CBP says Google is not informing users properly about its actions or asking them permission. This, the CBP says, contravenes Dutch law. Privacy regulators in Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy are also taking action, the CBP says.

IT World reports that Google had envisioned a complicated method to sniff traffic, but reporters showed Google engineers a diagram of the UK's intelligence agency methods to tap links between Google data centers.

Chris Soghoian, principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union, said that Chrome’s incognito feature will “do nothing” to protect users from government surveillance. Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt said the company complies with legal law enforcement requests and retains user data for a year because of government mandates.

The FAA says that it is still considering Amazon’s request for permission to experiment with drones in open airspace, and that it has requested additional information from the company, including an explanation of why drone delivery would be in the public interest. Vice-president of global public policy, Paul Misener, reply was: “I fear the FAA may be questioning the fundamental benefits of keeping [drone] technology in the United States.”

Amazon’s threat to shift its drone operations abroad is not an idle one. Google is testing unmanned aircraft in Australia, while the German delivery firm DHL has already begun to operate its “parcelcopter” to carry small packages to far-flung islands.

Google has lost a Court of Appeal bid to stop consumers having the right to sue in the UK over alleged misuse of privacy settings.

The case revolves around a so-called Safari workaround, which allegedly allowed Google to avoid the Safari web browser's default privacy setting to place cookies, that gathered data such as surfing habits, social class, race, ethnicity, without users' knowledge. A group of users claim that Google bypassed security settings on the Safari browser to install tracking cookies on their computers in order to target them with advertising.