European consumer advocacy group BEUC has just filed a new series of privacy complaints against Google – accusing the online advertising giant of deceptive designs around its account creation process that lead users to consent to widespread and intrusive data processing.
It is reported that Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) puts forward a default privacy requirement, but Google still goes to great lengths to make “users consent to their data collection” legalized.
European consumer advocacy groups pointed out: Through careful design, Google can more easily induce users to agree to their information processing requests, and then obtain greater benefits through a “personalized” advertising push, rather than allowing users to refuse outright.
For the privacy-conscious, the complaint also slammed Google’s complexity in setting up “privacy-friendly” options.
On the one hand, the tech giant offers personalization settings that can be adjusted manually, but users often need to straddle five large steps and ten clicks—not to mention the vague and misleading wording.
On the other hand, Google offers a one-click ‘quick personalization’ option – enabling all tracking with one click, but this is obviously a huge disadvantage to user privacy.
They also point out that Google doesn’t offer consumers a one-click option to turn off all tracking, or even force users to create an account before using certain products — such as when initializing an Android smartphone.
In a press release, the complainants said angrily — no matter which way consumers choose, Google’s data processing is deeply unfair and opaque. And all these twists and turns are aimed at using consumers’ personal data for obscure and far-reaching purposes.
It is reported that BEUC has lodged complaints with data protection authorities in EU member markets including France, the Czech Republic, Norway, Greece, and Slovenia.
Germany’s vzbv sent a warning to Google before filing a potential civil lawsuit, and consumers in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden also sent letters to local DPA agencies to remind them to strictly monitor these controversial practices.
If you like our news and you want to be the first to get notifications of the latest news, then follow us on Twitter and Facebook page and join our Telegram channel. Also, you can follow us on Google News for regular updates.