Alphabet Inc’s Google Analytics doesn’t sufficiently shield European Union residents’ data from doubtlessly unlawful US surveillance and may very well be banned altogether.
That’s the decision of the French data watchdog, which stated that shifting huge troves of data throughout the Atlantic is at present unsafe. Thursday’s determination by the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertes is the newest parry in an more and more tetchy back-and-forth between Big Tech and the bloc’s data privateness regulators.
A landmark European Union court docket ruling in 2020 raised the bar for the area’s watchdogs after judges expressed doubts about American surveillance legal guidelines and the safeguards in place to guard individuals’s data in opposition to unwarranted entry from spies.
Transatlantic data transfers “are currently not sufficiently regulated”, CNIL stated. Despite “additional measures” adopted by Google to make its Analytics instrument safer, “these are not sufficient to exclude the accessibility of this data for US intelligence services.”
Google spokespeople didn’t instantly reply to an e-mail searching for remark.
The 2020 determination additionally struck down the Privacy Shield, a instrument hundreds of firms relied on to soundly switch data to the US, forcing EU-US negotiators again to the desk to hammer out a brand new pact.
The French feedback observe Meta Platforms Inc’s renewed warning that the present regulatory state of affairs in Europe could lead on it to pulling Facebook and Instagram out of the area.
The controversy over data transfers stretches again to 2013, when former contractor Edward Snowden uncovered the extent of spying by the US National Security Agency.
CNIL stated its probe adopted complaints by privateness group Noyb in opposition to trans-Atlantic transfers of data collected via Google Analytics.
The determination “shows that the regulator considers that the risk of interception is enough in the case of Google Analytics”, a spokesperson for Noyb stated. “That means that other US based services where even more data are processed, will likely be subject to the same ruling.”
Facebook final 12 months misplaced an Irish court docket struggle over an preliminary order from its major EU privateness watchdog threatening a ban for its data transfers throughout the Atlantic. – Bloomberg
