Privacy regulators
in the EU have asked Google to delay its plan to begin compiling more detailed profiles of its users.
"Given the wide range of services you offer, and popularity of these services, changes in
your privacy policy may affect many citizens in most or all of the EU member states,” Jacob Kohnstamm, a top EU privacy official, wrote in a letter to CEO Larry Page.
Kohnstamm added
that regulators want to “check the possible consequences for the protection of the personal data of these citizens in a coordinated procedure.”
Google on Friday indicated that it
would reject the request.
Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said the company had “extensively pre-briefed” regulators prior to announcing the new policy. “At
no stage did any EU regulator suggest that any sort of pause would be appropriate,” Fleischer added in a letter responding to Kohnstamm.
The controversy stems from Google's announcement last week that it is changing its privacy policy. The new policy will allow Google to
aggregate data about signed-in users across a variety of products and services, including Gmail, YouTube, Picasa and Android. The new policy is slated to take effect on March 1.
Google will
draw on the compiled data to target ads and increase personalization. The company doesn't intend to collect any additional information or to share data with third parties.
Fleischer wrote on
Friday that the shift will enable a “simple, intuitive experience.” He said that current policies restrict the company's ability to offer personalized recommendations. “For
example,” he wrote, “if a user is signed in and searching Google for cooking recipes, our current privacy policies wouldn’t let us recommend cooking videos when she visits YouTube
based on her searches -- even though she was signed into the same Google Account when using both Google Search and YouTube.”
In the U.S. as well, some lawmakers and advocacy groups also
have expressed concern about the upcoming changes. Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) recently asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the upcoming
change violates Google's settlement stemming from the launch of Buzz.
That agreement requires Google to obtain people's express consent before sharing their information more broadly than its privacy policy allowed at the time of collection.
Users can't opt out of Google's new privacy policy, but can prevent Google from aggregating data across various services by signing out. The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation
also says that users can prevent the aggregation by creating multiple Gmail
accounts and then using different accounts (and different browsers) for different purposes.