Google privacy change taking effect today is illegal, EU officials say

European regulators claimed that Google's new privacy policy violates European law, but Google has started rolling it out to users anyway.

A French data protection commission investigating Google's privacy policy on behalf of the EU said this week that the privacy policy violates the European Data Protection Directive and that both the French "and the EU data protection authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of data across services and will continue their investigations with Google’s representatives." On March 1, an official with the EU agreed with the French position. "Data protection agencies in European countries have concluded Google's new privacy policy is in breach of European law,” EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said. The policy violates European law in numerous ways, Reding said. "One is that nobody had been consulted, it is not in accordance with the law on transparency and it utilizes the data of private persons in order to hand it over to third parties, which is not what the users have agreed to."