Google faces German warning over user profiling

Profiling Google users without their explicit consent is an unacceptable breach of customer privacy, according to a ruling by a German regulator that could force the US company to change the way it gathers personal information across multiple platforms.

Google falls foul of German rules by collecting information that allows the creation of “comprehensive personal records” of individual users, Johannes Caspar, the Hamburg data protection commissioner, has found. Germany’s concern relates to the gathering of personal data across multiple services, some of which, like Gmail, require users to register with Google. The compiled information could be used to infer an individual’s sexual orientation or relationship status, and to create detailed profiles of their travel based on location data, the regulator said. Caspar ordered Google to take steps to guarantee that users will be able to control the extent to which their data are used for profiling.