Two privacy advocating groups have filed an official complaint (PDF) with the American consumer watchdog Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about the new privacy policy that Google introduced earlier this year. Since June, Google combines data of several of its services such as its search engine, Maps and Gmail with data from DoubleClick, an advertising company which Google acquired in 2007.
DoubleClick is one the largest advertising networks on the internet and uses so-called 'tracking cookies' to follow internet users from site to site.
Existing Google users have to actively accept the new privacy policy before the two data source are combined, when they don't accept the new policy, the data continues to be separated according to Google. New users, however, have no choice, their data is always combined.
According to the American organisations Consumer Watch and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Google has mislead users by promising users more control over their privacy settings without being clear that their data would be combined. The organisations argue that therefore many users accepted the new privacy policy without knowing the actual consequences, .
Besides that, the organisations also argue Google shouldn't combined the data as the company promised that it wouldn't do so when it acquired DoubleClick in 2007.
The FTC has stated to be studying the complaint.
Since the changes in its privacy policy Google offers users a special privacy checkup page where they can change their data. On that page they allow Google to e.g. store web, app or location data. On the page users can also disable personalized advertisements.
