Google trying to evade UK privacy laws, campaigners claim
Source: The Guardian
Alexander Hanff, a privacy advocate who has been following the case, said: "I would hope that given the court already granted permission for the complaint to be served to Google Inc in California, that they will follow through and reject Google's defence." Writing on a website devoted to the case, he pointed to examples in Canada where Facebook had been sued in Canadian courts despite claiming its US status, and said that an FTC commissioner had "accepted that EU laws and EU countries do have extraterritorial jurisdiction with regards to enforcement of their laws". Google said it would not comment on ongoing legal actions. The case is scheduled to come before an English court in October.
Google is already the target of concerted efforts by European privacy regulators, where France has given it a deadline of the end of September to change its privacy policies to meet local laws, while Spain is pursuing six counts of privacy infringement.
That followed Google's unilateral meshing together in March 2012 of privacy policies separately covering each of its services – such as Maps, search and YouTube – into a single one, effectively tracking a user's activity across all those services.
Antitrust regulators in Europe are also negotiating with the search giant to reduce what is seen as favouritism of its own products, such as Google Shopping, in search results above rivals.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/google-privacy-laws-uk-lawsuit
