Google’s move to consolidate privacy policy documents for over 60 of its various Web products actually took place without much furor on March 1. But that lack of initial resistance was misleading: Google this week was hit with a barrage of legal fire in the U.S. and abroad over the consolidated privacy policy.
A trio of plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit in New York against Google over the new policy, alleging it violates the company’s previous policies and the Federal Wiretap Act, the Stored Electronics Communications Act, and the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, Los Angeles Times reported late Wednesday evening.
The suit claims to represent all Google Accounts-holders and Google Android phone owners nationwide, and seeks over $5 million in damages as well as an injunction to stop Google from implementing the new policy.
Intriguingly, it also compares Google to Facebook, arguing that Facebook offers a “holistic view of each consumer,” that Google sought to attain, along with corresponding ad revenue. (Facebook is the largest advertiser in the U.S. and Google is currently second.) Google’s competition with Facebook as a primary reason for why the plaintiffs believe Google proceeded to allegedly violate their privacy:
“Google’s new privacy policy is nothing more than Google’s effort to garner a larger market share of advertising revenue by offering targeted advertising capabilities that compete with or surpass those offered by social networks, such as Facebook…”
The complaint also accuses Google of violating its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over privacy violations related to its failed social networking effort Google Buzz, which the FTC is also reportedly looking into.
The plaintiffs in that case are represented by Grant & Eisenhofer, Bloomberg reported.
A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the case, but referred the The Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg to a blog post that Google published on March 1 outlining the new privacy policy and pushing back vociferously against the concerns, raised earlier by lawmakers and bloggers, that the new policy would allow Google an unprecedented ability to collect and combine user data.
Meanwhile, another group of two plaintiffs in California filed a separate class action suit against Google for much the same reasons, as well as two California-specific laws: The Right of Publicity Statute, which protects someone from using another person’s identity for commercial gain without consent, and the Unfair Competition Law, which states that consumers must be given fair and accurate representation of their business relationships with a company. The California suit also over $5 million in damages from Google for the violations.
Google isn’t finding any reprieve from litigation in Europe, either, where the French data protection agency CNIL sent Google a “detailed questionnaire” consisting of 69 different questions about the company’s privacy policy, seeking answers by April 5.
Also in Europe, Vint Cerf, Google’s “chief Internet evangelist” and a former Defense Department scientist considered one of the “fathers” of the Internet itself, gave an interview to UK website TechWeekEurope saying he was “puzzled by the reaction to the privacy policy,” and seeking to defend Google in the wake of the scrutiny from regulators and outrage from the public.
“I think we didn’t present this policy very well,” Cerf told the website. “We didn’t change the amount of data we employ, we didn’t change the way we use it. We don’t sell any of this information, it’s not our business model.”
Google has consistently said it was instituting the new “one size fits all” policy to offer users increased simplicity and transparency, as well as new types of experiences, such as the ability to combine live-traffic data from Google Maps and appointment data from Google Calendar to tell people when they are running late for an appointment, for example.
