Legislators To Investigate Google’s Data Privacy
A U.S. congressman announced Thursday that he and several colleagues would request a formal inquiry examining whether Google’s new policies for managing users’ personal data violate current Federal Trade Commission regulations.
A group of eight legislators spearheaded by Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey recently penned a letter to Google’s top brass in which they claimed they were worried about the privacy of consumer data under the Internet giant’s planned consolidation of user information.
Attaching their name to the letter were Republican representatives Cliff Stearns of Florida, Joe Barton of Texas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
Democratic signatories included Congressman Markey, Henry Waxman of California, Diana DeGette of Colorado, G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina and Jackie Speier of California.
With the exception of Speier, all of the lawmakers are part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Markey later told Reuters that he would be asking regulators at the FTC to look into Google’s upcoming privacy policy changes to determine whether or not they are in line with the company’s recent settlement with the government agency.
After the anticlimactic premier of Google’s first social network Buzz last year, the company reached a settlement the FTC in March in which Google agreed to acquire the consent of users if it modifies privacy policies.
Last Tuesday, the web juggernaut announced that it would consolidate some 60 of its privacy policies in order to streamline the “Google experience” for its users.
Problematic, however, is the fact that under the new policy, data collected from users of Google’s various arms—including Gmail, Google+ and YouTube—would henceforth be lumped together and treated as a single class of data.
Markey and his crew of legislators say they’re concerned that consumers will not have enough of a say in dictating how their data is used.
“While Google suggests that the purpose of this shift in policy is to make the consumer experience simpler, we want to make sure it does not make protecting consumer privacy more complicated,” the congressmen wrote in a letter they sent Thursday to Google CEO Larry Page.
On Thursday Google’s policy manager Betsy Masiello responded to the letter by stating unequivocally that the company’s users would in fact continue to have “choice and control” in terms of how their data is used.
“We’re not collecting more data about you. Our new policy simply makes it clear that we use data to refine and improve your experience on Google. […] We’re making things simpler and we’re trying to be upfront about it. Period.”
Google is just one in a series of large Internet companies to come under fire from Washington in recent years over user data and privacy policies. In a settlement with the FTC reached just a few months ago, Facebook agreed to let the government organization oversee any changes it makes to its privacy policies. In 2010, Twitter was also charged by the regulatory agency with failing to adequately secure its users’ personal information.
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