The European troubles of the tech giant expand: now the German data protection watchdog has criticized the search engine Google for the way the company creates data profiles from its numerous services. Media reports confirmed that the data protection commissioner for the German city state of Hamburg has recently demanded Google to take the necessary technical and organizational measures to make sure that the Internet users were able to decide on their own if and to what extend their information can be used for profiling.

The German commissioner Johannes Caspar complaints that the tech giant had refused to grant its users more control over how it collects data across its various services, including Gmail, Android and the web search engine. In addition, the Hamburg watchdog claimed it represented the part of a European task force evaluating the privacy policy of the multinational corporation.

For example, the watchdog reminds that processing information which reveals financial wealth, sexual orientation and relationship status, as well as other aspects of private life, is against the law in Germany – unless users give their explicit consent. Google didn’t provide any comments on the issue thus far, but the Financial Times earlier quoted Google’s spokesman as saying that the company was studying the order trying to determine its next moves.

It should be noted that a few days ago European data privacy regulators handed the tech giant a list of guidelines in order to help Google fix the way it collects and stores user information and bring it in line with European law. Germany is therefore not the only country to question the company’s policy. A number of other EU states, including Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands, have all launched investigations into Google after it consolidated its 60 privacy policies into one and began to aggregate information collected on individual users across its various services, such as YouTube, Gmail and Google Maps.