Google and privacy are two words that when put together almost never turn out to be good news. To confirm this rule, the American company is under fire once again for privacy violation issues with possible harmful consequences for users. This time, Google is being accused by two advocacy groups of breaking the law by changing its privacy policy without any prior notice and consent from users. Consumer Watchdog and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse exposed a case that has everything to become yet another interesting confrontation featuring one of the world’s most valuable companies. It might result in another couple of months of hard work for its more than 400 lawyers since the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is also involved in the situation, obviously opposing Google.
In 2007 Google acquired DoubleClick (a service which, in short, creates and serves ads) and assured the world that they would never combine their cookie information with personally identifiable information without permission. Notwithstanding, Consumer Watchdog and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse claim that Google’s promise was broken due to the new privacy policy introduced in June 2016, according to which the company stated that the services that they own may now start combining even personal information between each other. Furthermore, a spokesman of one of the advocacy groups stated: “Google induced users to accept the change to its privacy policy by cloaking it in an offer to enable ‘new features’ that purport to provide ‘more control’ over users’ personal information”. This already led the groups to demand that FTC recovers “all advertising revenue earned by Google since the date of the change”.
We all know how Google likes to constantly keep one eye on its users and how much trouble the company manages to get into somehow. Surely you remember the 2012 United States vs Google Inc. case, when the latter was found guilty of violating its privacy policy (and an FTC’s administrative order from a previous case) for placing ad tracking cookies in the Safari web browser to serve targeted advertisements to Apple users. It resulted in the FTC imposing a fine of $22.5 million, the highest ever on the company. There was also another notorious case when Google was accused of “accidentally” collecting emails and other personal data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks while driving its vehicles through neighborhoods of over 30 countries to collect photos to build Street View. Also, who doesn’t remember the infamous “right to be forgotten” case? Unfortunately, the list goes on and on…
Because of all this, you should be careful when dealing with Google, or any other cyber company. Make sure to invest in your online protection. If you think a decent antivirus and ad-blocking solution is enough, you are wrong. In fact, a VPN is much needed, since it will assure that you have an extra layer of protection, encrypting and securing your online data via safe tunnels with specially designed protocols, even via their mobile apps for when you’re using vulnerable public Wi-Fi networks.
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