20th March, 2012
The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), a coalition of US and EU consumer advocacy groups coordinated by Consumers International has sent a letter to the head of Google calling on the search giant to suspend its controversial changes to its privacy policy.
The changes, which take effect across the world from 1 March, will allow Google to monitor signed-in users across a wide array of its products, including its search engine, YouTube, Gmail and Blogger.
The TACD letter asks Google CEO Larry Page to “suspend your March 1 plan to modify the terms of services for users of Google services… [as] It is both unfair and unwise for you to ‘change the terms of the bargain’ as you propose to do.”
The letter goes on to outline TACD’s concerns: “you propose to combine data from all of your services, provided by your users in very different contexts and for very different reasons, into a single profile without user consent and without any meaningful opportunity for users to opt-out.”
Consumer rights groups across the world have expressed concern about Google’s privacy change, which many see as another step in the continuing erosion of privacy in the digital age.
—Henry Ojelu