Google Fined for Breaking Spanish Data Law

The tech giant was fined for combining personal data from different Internet services and failing to inform people on data use. This is why Spanish privacy watchdog fined the company for breaking the local data protection legislation when combining personal data from its many different Internet services and failing to inform Google users clearly on how their sensitive data is used.

Despite the fact that the €900,000 fine is non-significant for the company with a market capitalization of over $350bn, it still indicates growing concerns across Europe about the amount of personal information gathered in cloud storage services in foreign jurisdictions.

This is where the information is stored remotely via the worldwide web instead of onsite, leaving people little control over their personal data. In November, the Dutch Data Protection Authority also accused Google of breaking the national data privacy law for the same practices. France moved closer to fining Google in September as well.

In the meantime, investigations are ongoing in at least three other EU countries, triggered after the company imposed new terms of service on users of all its cloud services – YouTube, Gmail and Google search. Spanish inspections revealed that the company compiled personal data through almost 100 of its services and products, often without providing adequate information about the data that is being collected, reason for that collection and lacking the consent of the owners.

The tech giant claimed that it had engaged with the Spanish authorities to explain its privacy policy and was going to decide on which action to take after it had the opportunity to fully read the report. The Spanish consumer watchdog claimed users weren’t sufficiently informed that the company filtered the content of their emails and files in order to display proper advertising. Even if Google did so, it used a terminology that was “imprecise, unclear and with generic expressions”.

Spain also accused Google of breaking the law by using information it collected for purposes which were unspecified and keeping this data for an indefinite time, sometimes hindering people in their right to erase, access or modify that information. Last month the company agreed to pay a $17 million fine to settle allegations that it secretly tracked Internet users by placing special digital files on the web browsers of their mobile devices.