Tag: Google
17. November 2016
This week, Reuters reported that U.S. internet companies, such as Facebook and Amazon have sent a detailied letter including a list of their policiy priorities to President-elect Donald Trump. Among the topics of these policies are encryption, immigration reform and maintaining liability protections from user’s content.
The mentioned letter was sent by the so called Internet Association, which is a group of 40 members, also including Alphabet’s Google, Uber and Twitter. The letter tries to repair the relationship between the internet giants and Trump due to the fact that he was almost universally disliked during the presidential campaign.
The president of the Internet Association, Michael Beckermann signed the letter talking about “The internet industry looks forward to engaging in an open and productive dialogue”. Furthermore, Beckerman issued a statement syaing that the internet industry looked forward to working closely with Trump and lawmakers in Congress in order to “cement the internet’s role as a driver of economic and social progress for future generations.”
The letter describes some of the policies which go along with Trump’s prior statements, for example easing the regulation on the sharing economy and applying pressure on Europe to not erect too many barriers that restrict U.S. internet companies from growing in that market.
However, other topics are likely to be opposed with Trump’s campaign as he offered numerous broadsides against the tech sector.
10. November 2016
Reuters online reported that Telefonica Deutschland’s chief executive, Thorsten Dirks, said in an interview “People are right to scrutinize any attempt to make money off their data. At the same time they are a handing over data voluntarily to companies such as Google and Facebook”. He concludes that there is a double standard among consumers.
At the moment Telefonica Deutschland holds anonymized data of 44 million mobile customers. These information could be used to track the movements of crowds and traffic, as well as “many other areas that we at the moment cannot think of”, according to Dirks.
Dirks explained that Telefonica aims to be a platform for all devices connected to the internet and therefore processing all sorts of data gathered from sensors in cars, electronic devices and household apparel.
24. October 2016
Since the ECJ established the right to be delisted from search engines (right to be forgotten) in 2014, Google has received numerous requests from individuals and organizations regarding the deletion of search results that contain their personal data which is not any more current, correct, relevant or which causes damages to the data subjects. The right to be forgotten refers to certain domains, such as co.uk; fr, de, es or nl.
However the French DPA requested Google to delete these results from all Google search domains (including .com). As Google did not fully comply with this request, the French DPA (CNIL) imposed Google a fine early this year.
As the French Highest Court has still to decide about this, Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia, filed a petition in order to take part in the case and support Google France regarding the ongoing dispute about implementation of the “right to be forgotten”. Wikimedia’s legal counsel said in a statement that “no single nation should attempt to control what information the entire world may access”. Furthermore, she added that the application of the right to be forgotten involves the disappearance of several Wikimedia websites, which has an impact on the availability of knowledge.
Not only in France, but also in other jurisdictions is Google facing similar processes regarding the application of the right to be forgotten.
31. August 2016
On its blog Google Analytics announced on the 29th of August that they have self-certified to the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield.
The statement describes the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield as a new framework for transfers of personal data from Europe to the United States, which can be seen as a significant milestone for the protection of Europeans’ personal data, legal certainty of transatlantic businesses, and trust in the digital economy.
Therefore, Google has now committed that they comply with the Privacy Shield’s principles and furthermore that they will safeguard the transfers of personal data, whereas no action is required from their customers.
24. May 2016
Allo, the new instant messaging app from Google, has been presented this week and is expected to be available for users this summer. As many other technological companies, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, or Apple, Google has decided to implement end-to-end encryption in this app. End-to-end encryption ensures privacy in certain messaging and video call apps so that not even authorities have access to the information stored.
However, unlike WhatsApp, Facebook messenger or iMessage, end-to-end encryption in Allo has to be activated by the user by selecting the “incognito” mode, what has been subject to strong criticism. As Google explained, end-to-end encryption is not activated by default in order to be able to connect it with the functionalities of Google Assistant, which provides tailored recommendations to its users according to the data stored in Google apps. This means that queries to Google’s own servers may be necessary. If “incognito” mode is active Google Assistant’s features may not be able to be used.
Morey Haber, Vice-President of technology, at the cybersecurity company BeyondTrust, acknowledges the possibility to combine end-to-end encryption with the artificial intelligence feature, but he admits that in this case it is not possible that the queries to Google Assistant are fully processed.
Google engineer, Thai Duong, has posted in his personal blog about the security and privacy features of the app.
17. May 2016
Two years ago, the Court of Justice of the European Union established the “right to be forgotten”. An organization named Reputation VIP launched a website, forget.me, that should help consumers in Europe submitting requests to Google and Bing.
Based on the consumer submissions through the site, 130,000 URLs, the company released a new report on the trends of the outcome of the requests of the “right to be forgotten” related to geographic location and success rates of those requests.
The study shows, that with regard to geographical means the top three countries from which requests originate are Germany, the UK and France. In more detail it is to say, that more than half of all requests came from Germany and the UK.
With respect to the success rates of the mentioned requests the report states, that Google denies about 70 percent to 75 percent of them.
Furthermore, the study shows, that Google most frequently denies removal requests concerning professional activity. Whereas the type of request is in 61 % of the cases due to an invasion of privacy.
20. April 2016
The New York Times reports that crisicism is raised among European data protection regulators and politicians on Google’s secretive process for deciding whose “right to be forgotten” cases end with a stricken link and whose do not. The lack of the company’s transparency is not the only concern regarding how a private organization has autonomy in these cases instead of the government. Furthermore, Google has ruled on double the amount of national authorities’ privacy judgments. “If Europe really wanted to regain control over personal data, giving Google this type of power is an odd outcome,” concluded Oxford University’s Luciano Floridi.
The criticism is also raised as a result of a general growing discontent from both European regulators and politicians due to the fact that national data protection agencies sometimes lack the financial, technical and human resources to handle the substantial increase of “right to be forgotten” requests, according to regulatory officials and legal experts.
29. March 2016
The French Data Protection Authority (“CNIL”) fines Google for data protection violation. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice had decided, that citizens could request search engines to delist inadequate or irrelevant web search results of themselves; the so-called “right-to-be-forgotten” was born.
The CNIL has now fined the US search engine 100.000 Euros over the right-to-be-forgotten, since Google just delisted web search results regionally, for instance only accross their European websites, such as google.fr and not also on the google.com website. By delisting web search results of a person only regionally, the data subject will practically not be able to exercise her/his right-to-be-forgotten efficiently. Search engines should instead delist search results from all their domains.
