Google got slapped with a fine for not adjusting its user tracking practices to French law

Jan 9, 2014 08:09 GMT  ·  By

Google got another fine from a European country and this time it’s France. The €150,000 ($204,000) that the company has to pay, however, seem like pocket change.

The fine comes as Google didn’t meet a deadline set by the data protection watchdog CNIL to align its practice of tracking and storing user information with the country’s laws.

CNIL believes that the company does not sufficiently inform users of the conditions under which their personal data are processed, or the purpose of this processing. As punishment, aside from the fine, Google will have to publish the decision on google.fr for 48 hours within eight days of being notified of the ruling.

The issues started back in June when the French authorities decided that Google had breached six counts of the local privacy laws. The biggest concern was that they weren’t providing enough information about the terms in which the user data was used or stored.

It looks like the issue that the French have with Google is the way the company combines about 60 privacy policies together and collects data on users from all of its services, including Gmail, Google+, YouTube and Android without giving users the option to opt out.

Google said that it would look into the situation. As in the case with Spain, Google said that the way it handled data helped create simpler and more efficient services.

The American Internet giant is facing further fines of €300,000 ($408,000) if it continues to ignore the issue.

This isn’t the first case against Google. Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands have all launched similar cases against the company as they consider that the giant firm’s privacy policy doesn’t abide by local laws.

Spain has recently slammed Google with a €900,000 ($1.2 million) fine for three violations – not getting explicit consent for using user data, not giving details about the type of data it collects and not giving information about what the data is used for.

In the third quarter of 2013, Google had revenues of $14.9 billion (€11 billion) and a profit of $2.97 billion (€2.18 billion).