Six European data protection agencies are contemplating legal action over Google’s privacy policy. The threat comes as a four-month deadline to change the policy expires with Google making "no change" to the policy.
Google’s perceived failure to act is being looked in to by data watchdogs in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK. In a statement, Google said its privacy policy "respects European law".
In late October 2012, a European Commission working party reported that Google’s privacy policy did not meet Commission standards on data protection.
The report said Google should do more to let users see what information was held about them, provide tools to manage this data and take more care to ensure it did not store too much data about users. The investigation was kicked off by Google’s decision to update its privacy policy so it had one set of guidelines for every service it ran.
Google was given four months to comply with the working party’s recommendations to bring the policy into line with European law.
"After this period has expired, Google has not implemented any significant compliance measures," said French data watchdog CNIL in a statement. CNIL headed the probe into the privacy policy.