Tuesday 24 April 2018

Alphabet results: Google faces critics over plans to avoid fines as European law looms.

Publishers claim Google is going against the spirit of new data protection rules with a plan to shelter its third party data, used for targeted advertising, from European lawmakers.

The technology giant is preparing for incoming General Data Protection Regulation, which will offer Europeans greater privacy by restricting how companies use people’s data from May 25.

Companies typically use third party data to match up customer databases. For example, a retailer of shoes may match a database to one about clothing purchasing habits in order to target potential shoppers with products that are relevant.

Google, which describes itself as a data controller, will be held accountable if its customers abuse data it sells on under the new rules. Investors and analysts are hoping its latest quarterly earnings, due to be published on Monday evening, will shed light on how GDPR will affect a company so dependent on personal data and uses bought-in data from advertisers and publishers, which is applied to 1bn users. The tech giant's third party data is reported to be worth around $20bn in advertising revenue. 

“Google and Facebook are both taking a strategy where they are trying to protect the status quo and doing what they’ve done historically,” Jason Kint, chief executive officer of Digital Content Next, a US trade association for online publishers, told The Financial Times.




By Margi Murphy.

Full story at Yahoo News.

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