France fines Google for being vague

The French regulator has swung the GDPR stick for the first time and landed it firmly on Google’s rump, costing the firm €50 million for transparency and consent violations.

The National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) has been investigating the search engine giant since May when None Of Your Business (NOYB) and La Quadrature du Net (LQDN) filed complaints suggesting GDPR violations. The claims specifically suggested Google was not providing adequate information to the user on how data would be used or retained for, while also suggesting Google made the process to find more information unnecessarily complex.

“Users are not able to fully understand the extent of the processing operations carried out by Google,” the CNIL said in a statement.

“But the processing operations are particularly massive and intrusive because of the number of services offered (about twenty), the amount and the nature of the data processed and combined. The restricted committee observes in particular that the purposes of processing are described in a too generic and vague manner, and so are the categories of data processed for these various purposes.”

This seems to be the most prominent issue raised by the CNIL. Google was being too vague when obtaining consent in the first instance, but when digging deeper the rabbit hole become too complicated.

Information on data processing purposes, the data storage periods or the categories of personal data used for the ad personalization were spread across several pages or documents. It has been deemed too complicated for any reasonable member of the general public to make sense of and therefore a violation of GDPR.

When first obtaining consent, Google did not offer enough clarity on how data would be used, therefore was without legal grounding to offer personalised ads. Secondly, the firm then wove too vexing a maze of red-tape for those who wanted to understand the implications further.

It’ll now be interesting to see how many other firms are brought to the chopping block. Terms of Service have been over-complicated documents for a long-time now, with the excessive jargon almost becoming best practise in the industry. Perhaps this ruling will ensure internet companies make the legal necessities more accessible, otherwise they might be facing the same swinging GDPR stick as Google has done here.

For those who are finding the NOYB acronym slightly familiar it might be because the non-profit recently filed complaints against eight of the internet giants, including Google subsidiary YouTube. These complaints focus on ‘right to access’ clauses in GDPR, with none of the parties responding to requests with enough information on how data is sourced, how long it would be retained for or how it has been used.

As GDPR is still a relatively new set of regulations for the courts to ponder, the complaints from NOYB and LQDN were filed almost simultaneously as the new rules came into force, this case gives some insight into how sharp the CNIL’s teeth are. €50 million might not be a monstrous amount for Google, but this is only a single ruling. There are more complaints in the pipeline meaning the next couple of months could prove to be very expensive for the Silicon Valley slicker.