Google warned to change the way it pieces together data about users in Germany

The Hamburg Data Protection Authority in Germany has warned Google to curb its profiling activities in the country or risk facing fines or other measures.

In a statement yesterday, the organization said Google’s ability to piece together information about users across the breadth of its services (Google Maps and Gmail, for example) violates local privacy laws.

As such, it will need to make significant changes to the way in which it handles its triangulation of personal data to ensure that people give consent for it being used to profile them in this way. Exactly how it will do that is yet to be explained, but Google’s privacy collection techniques have come under fire from a number of countries following the company’s decision to combine its discrete privacy policies into one all encompassing document that gives it the right to collect combined data. In a statement given to TechCrunch, Google said it was “now studying their order to determine next steps.”

➤ Wesentliche Änderungen bei der Datenverarbeitung von Google notwendig – Datenschutzaufsicht erlässt Anordnung [via TechCrunch]

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