The Australian government has filed its current lawsuit against Google in less than a year for privacy reasons, this time alleging that the tech giant tricked Australian customers into collecting data for targeted advertising. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the country’s customer control body, says Google has received particular customer consent to collect non-public data, according to a statement.
The ACCC cites a 2016 replacement for Google’s policy in which the company began collecting information about the activity of Google account holders on sites other than Google. Previously, this knowledge was collected through the generation of corporate DoubleClick ads and stored separately, without being connected to users’ Google accounts. Google acquired DoubleClick in 2008, and replacing Google’s policy in 2016 resulted in the combination of Google and DoubleClick customer knowledge. Google then used enhanced knowledge to sell even more specific ads.
From June 2016 to December 2018, Google account holders were received through a pop-up with the “optional features” of accounts related to how the company collected their data. Consumers can simply click “I agree” and Google would begin to collect “a wide diversity of personally identifiable information” from them, according to the ACCC. The lawsuit argues that the pop-up did not adequately do what consumers accepted.
“The ACCC believes that consumers pay for Google’s installations with their data, so this substitution brought through Google has a “higher price for Google’s facilities, without the wisdom of consumers,” ACCC President Rod Sims said. If more consumers had sufficiently understood Google’s replacement policy, many may not have accepted it, according to the ACCC.
Google told The Associated Press that it disagreed with the ACCC’s accusations, and said Google account holders had been asked to “give their consent to receive visual and easy-to-understand notifications.” It is not known what sanction the ACCC seeks with the trial.
Last October, the ACCC sued Google, claiming that the company had misled Android users about the ability to disable location tracking on phones and tablets. The case will be mediated next week, according to a February Computer World article.