The temptation of Google

**Ah, Google! Without it, the Internet would probably have a quite different face. And Presseurop, which uses its online apps, would be a lot harder to publish. Building on its capacity to innovate and learn from its mistakes, in less than 15 years, the giant of Mountain View has become indispensable for most Internet users.

With 96% of its funding from advertising (2011) and control of more than 44% of the global ad market on the web — most of its services are without charge. To make a profit from the offer of free data, which has been one of the keys to its success, Google inserts more or less discreet adverts into its pages. And the targeting of these adverts is increasingly refined. With every web search, every map consulted, every item of information shared on social networks, every location signaled via smartphone, every exchange of emails and every video watched on YouTube, you add a piece to the mosaic of your virtual profile on Google’s computers. This enables the company to provide you with the search results — and advertising — it assumes are most appropriate for you. This also means excluding others to the point where it could be making us more stupid, as specialist writer Nicholas Carr pointed out in 2008.

Such an intrusion into the private lives of some 350 million users naturally requires their consent. Until February of this year, all of Google’s 70 services had their own confidentiality policies, which users had to accept on a case by case basis. With goal of simplification in mind, Google decided to regroup these in one agreement, and at the same time announced that from now on it will cross reference personal data from all of its services: users already registered with one Google service will not have to read any further agreements, and Google will be able to do a better job of fine tuning their profiles.

Sounds like a win-win scenario. However, it is not to the taste of the data protection authorities of 27 EU member states participating in the Article 29 Working party, which pointed out that Google’s new confidentiality policy is in conflict with the European directive on the protection of personal data. They asked Google to postpone the application of the new rules — which it refused to do — and mandated the French IT and Civil Liberties Commission (CNIL) to conduct an investigation on behalf of the EU. Inits report submitted on 16 October, the CNIL requested that Google better inform its users about the data it collects and the use made of it, notably with regard to the duration of storage, the combination of different data elements, and finally offer users the possibility of simply refusing to to authorise the collection of their data. Google CEO Larry Pageresponded that the new policy did not infringe European law and that it was essential for the development of new products. If Google does not comply with EU regulations, it runs the risk of having to pay a 150,000 euro fine in each of the EU’s member states — which is small change when viewed in the context of the 7.18 billion euros in profits it earned in 2011.

In short, the battle between Google (which is also the target of a European Commission antitrust investigation) and Brussels is not over yet. And lest we forget, it highlights two fundamental points about the worldwide web: the first is that nothing is completely free, and the second is that Internet users have very little — or even no — control over their personal data once it has been registered online. This is why Internet law, which is largely based on consensus, is progressively being developed. To rein in the Internet like they do in some countries, where democracy is not quite what it should be, would be a mistake. Leaving the management of the process to the actors themselves would place the weaker party — that is to say individual users — at the mercy of any temptation that may corrupt the giant of the web. Even if Google’s slogan says “Don’t be evil”.**