French DPC Slaps Google With 150k Fine

The French data protection authorities have fined Google 150000 Euro and obliged them to put a notice on their home page announcing the fine:

The fine is the largest ever levied against a company in France and is due to both the seriousness of the data privacy issues and the number of of them (I’m paraphrasing):

La sanction pécuniaire décidée constitue le montant le plus élevé prononcé jusqu’à présent par la formation restreinte. Elle se justifie par le nombre et la gravité des manquements constatés.

You can read full details about the fine and the rationale behind it here (in French)

Basically Google changed their policies a while back and rationalised that by so doing they’d make thing simpler and easier for users to understand.

However the data protection authorities disagreed. The Article 29 Working Party studied the documentation provided by Google and came up with a number of recommendations that they felt needed to be followed. Google chose to ignore them and has now been slapped with a 150 thousand Euro fine by the French data protection authorities.

Oh and here’s the fun part – as the Article 29 WP covers all 28 member states there’s no reason why each of the other member states wouldn’t follow suit. To date both the Dutch and Spanish authorities have found against Google, so that leaves 25 countries who could do the same

(Via Luc: https://twitter.com/lseufer/status/431941617600454656)