The New Information Economy

Last week saw the latest chapter unfold in Google’s privacy battle with the European Union. In October 2012, France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertes, or CNIL published a set of recommendations, on behalf of 27 European data protection authorities, suggesting that Google should address the “uncontrolled combination of data across services” and other data collection issues in its new privacy policy. The CNIL has now announced that Google has not provided a satisfactory response and it will proceed with recommending “repressive action” against Google. My colleague Jeff Gould published a piece this week on Google’s new battle with Europe and asked the question: who will win? Perhaps an equally interesting question to ask is: why isn’t Google complying with European privacy requests? No one can know for sure what Google’s management is thinking but one set of circumstances may be a factor in its lack of response. Read the rest of this entry »