Google accused of GDPR privacy violations by seven countries

> In our opinion, the scale in which Google tracks the location of its users breaches the GDPR. Users have not given free, specific, informed and unambiguous consent to the collection and use of location data, particularly considering the scale of tracking going on, says Gro Mette Moen.

https://www.forbrukerradet.no/side/google-manipulates-users-...

1) Simple cost/benefit. The EU has very little to lose and very much to gain by making rules favoring internet users. The US has very little to gain and very much to lose by making rules harming internet companies.

2) Trust. Europeans trust their governments to do good for them compared to internet companies. Americans trust their governments to do worse to them compared to internet companies. It's quite possible both are right. Similarly, Europeans implicitly trust this is not the beginning of a slippery slope of internet legislation whereas Americans very much fear that giving lawmakers an inch encourages them to take a mile. Same goes for willingness to repeal.

3) Enforcement. Europeans know, based on previous incarnations and regulator statements, that enforcement will be lax and/or subjective and/or limited in scope. Americans fear large-scoped laws since they expect enforcement and court battles once on the books.

4) Perceived harm. Europeans see many more harms from these internet companies than do Americans (HN notwithstanding). Americans simply don't believe tracking and data collection of public data is that big of a deal, especially for the tradeoff they get in services they or others choose to use. It's apathy, not ignorance as many here would have you believe.

5) Scope. Kinda the same as trust, Europeans aren't bothered by large-scoped legislation against businesses and Americans are. I suspect you'll see transparency/disclosure requirements one day in very limited form, but I doubt it'll become so expansive as allowing user requests, requiring certain forms/figureheads, and forcing businesses to do business with the user after opting out of tracking.

6) Freedoms. Europeans see a clear separation between consumers and companies wrt freedoms. Americans see companies, especially small ones, as just collections of citizens. Small business and entrepreneur compliance burdens are very much considered by American lawmakers on new law areas like the open internet.

There are exceptions to all of this of course, but I gather these are the general climate differences.

The USA (generally) believes in negative liberty which is based around the individual being able to do whatever they want unless it actually harms another person.

Both positive and negative liberty are valid views but generally positive liberty leads towards trouble in the form of authoritarian issues.

I'm inclined to believe that our politicians don't fancy to get their reach to the public(therefore, their careers) being controlled by an American organization that would sell that reach to the highest bidder or to US interests.

Also, I think that companies or governments knowing too much about you and then doing bad things with that information is not a fiction but a memory or a lesson from the history books and this helps with the public support.

I think they want to have a rule book in place so that they know how these internet media giants operate and make sure that Facebook is making their money by showing chocolate ads but not selling information to 3rd parties who want to shape the political landscape in Europe.

They wouldn't want, for example, have Bulgaria being targeted by Russia or Turkey and start another civil war in the Balkans through acquiring detailed profile information of the few million people there.

True, in the US consumer rights are largely a joke, but on the same token doing business in the EU seems to be a huge regulatory mess for corporations both abroad and internal and it's quite hard to imagine any company in the EU reaching the heights of Microsoft or Apple, or even seeing more adventurous and risky endeavors like Tesla.

Pros and cons to both sides of having such rules. I'm certainly on the side of believing pro-consumer rights, but the lack of them may not be entirely a bad thing from a macro economic standpoint either.

I have seen in my third world nation we have worst vehicle/ industrial pollution in the world, but govt will rain on cigarette smokers like ton of bricks as if it is the biggest issue in public health. But in reality govt act such way because it is easy to legislate while showing people they care.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_groups_of_the_Europe...

Former Soviet states now EU members have fresh memories of surveillance running amok.

The US is starting to lean towards the realization big tech needs to be regulated, but it's going to take us longer to get there.

In the first half of the 1940s, the state not being fully informed about what you are doing could mean the difference between life and death. In the four and a half decades following that half the continent was living under an oppressive regime that was carefully monitoring every citizen, and people had to be careful to not disappear.

As a consequence, the potential consequences of a lack of privacy are fresh on everyone's mind. Compare that to the US, which in the same time was dismantling privacy protections on the hunt for Communists.

It has been a slow evolution from my perspective. I came to the European Union around 2006. Facebook started to become popular, myspace was starting to collapse. Smartphones were rare at that time and not really recognizable as such. The internet giants were not so giant at that time. In Eastern Europe during the cold war, spy networks caused a lot of problems for people, and most people in Western Europe were and are still keenly aware of these problems. Note that a right to data protection and privacy existed in the EU since 1995, well before I arrived.

Around that time, a big scandal in the country I was living in was the knowledge that telephone records had been leaked to the security services without a warrant. Bear in mind that such a thing doesn't require a warrant in the USA and you can already see a difference between US and EU culture on data protection. On the other hand, legislation was proposed which would eliminate the warrant requirements... sadly I'm not sure what became of it.

The next big things that happened were extreme popularization of facebook, google creating search bubbles and android and iphone launching. People started to realize that these companies knew a lot of information about them. A sort of right was created in Europe (ostensibly it already existed via the 1995 directive?) to be able to access one's data. A large fight against Facebook was started to gain access to one's data.

That triggered two things. People were astounded at the extent of the information that they had willingly submitted, and people noticed that they were not given access to the information that they had not willingly submitted. As in, Facebook showed you the posts you made, but didn't show you the log of websites you had visited while logged into facebook and a like button was shown. This brought a lot of focus onto tracking cookies.

Enter the tracking cookie law. Most people just refer to it as the "cookie law", but what the law actually does is distinguish between necessary cookies like session cookies and long lived, permanent cookies or short lived cookies for tracking purposes. The intention behind this law was, drive companies towards the use of short lived session cookies and away from tracking cookies. It was light touch in that there were no real fines. It failed miserably; you can blame the legislators, but companies showed no willingness to abide by the spirit of the law and just put blanket consent banners in front of users with only a Hobson's choice.

The GDPR added teeth. With fines proportional to revenue. With definitions about what consent needs to look like to avoid the cookie loopholes. Moreover, the right to delete your data.

TL,DR: privacy concerns eroded in the USA in the telephone era while Europe was at that time keenly aware of the dangers of spy organizations and friends and family spying on you. As technology evolved, Europe has tried to keep pace and define what the right to privacy means in regards to the newer technology.

These are my opinions as a tech savvy, privacy aware, resident of the union.

Google stores your personal data in order to serve it back to you in one form or another. If you no longer want Google to serve that data back to you, if you're no longer happy with Google having a copy of that data, then it immediately becomes a liability rather than an asset. It's like poison in the sugar bowl, nothing good comes from it. Google does not want that kind of data, and there are lots of people whose job is to ensure that no data of that category is ever collected or retained.

You probably want to tell me that advertising targeting is just as effective if data is unwanted, or something similar about hypothetical incentives. But no, the costs outweigh the returns in the long game. This is a dead end.

In this particular case, there is a feature called Location History. It collects and allows you to query you location history. You can turn the feature on or off. But because of its clever name, some privacy wathdog organizations felt like turning this feature off should be expected cause all information relating to locations to be scrubbed from all the history from all the other products and features. That sounds absurd when you say it like that. But when you're dying for a reason to sue Google, you take what you can get.

The irony is that this level of scrutiny is only possible because Google is exceptionally careful about making available to users all the information that they have relating to those users, and allowing users to delete or edit it. They've been doing it long before the GDPR was even a concept, in fact for the most part the GDPR was just a codification of Google's existing (and often unique) practices as law.

I mostly have Dating Adds now.but a few month ago, I use to have a lot of wedding related stuff.

Looks like EU might put the brakes on a lot of this creepy crap. As much 4% of revenue or close to $5 billion fine....$5 billion for this, $4b for another...and all of the sudden we're talking real money.