Google on Wednesday was slapped with a fine by French regulators for violating privacy laws in the country. France’s CNIL published a press release on Wednesday stating that it issued the penalty late last week. The fine, which amounts to just under $204,ooo, is a result of Google’s move to merge various privacy policies into one blanket policy. According to the CNIL, the new policy that went into effect in March 2012 does not comply with France’s Data Protection Act.
“On 1 March 2012, Google decided to merge into one single policy the different privacy policies applicable to about sixty of its services, including Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Picasa, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc. Nearly all Internet users in France are impacted by this decision due to the number of services concerned,” the CNIL said in its press release.
The release continued, “The « G29 » (the Working Group of all EU Data Protection Authorities) then decided to carry out an assessment of this privacy policy. It concluded that it failed to comply with the EU legal framework and correspondingly issued several recommendations, which Google Inc. did not effectively follow-up upon. Consequently, six EU Authorities individually initiated enforcement proceedings against the company.”
In addition to paying the $204,000 fine, Google has also been ordered to publish a notice on the home page of its French website http://google.fr for two days acknowledging the committee’s decision.
Google was also recently fined $1.2 million for unlawfully collecting data on its users in Spain.
