EU investigating Google's data-driven business model

Google and other platforms are being probed over how they track users across the internet, EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager has warned as she prepares to take on an extra role as technology czar.

Commissioner Vestager is investigating “the data business model” used by Google and others to collect information on how people use the web, she told reporters at a Copenhagen press briefing yesterday.

She said the EU has posed “many questions to Google and others to get their views” and help the EU understand how the industry works, with a focus on contractual terms.

“If you don’t have a Google account, you never watch YouTube and you never receive mail from a Gmail account and you don’t Google anything, the company still tracks about 80pc of your online activity,” Ms Vestager said. “Because the sites you visit use Google Analytics. We think it’s interesting to look into which conditions make it work that way.”

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Data is the latest battleground for the EU’s antitrust authority, with Amazon.com being probed over how it uses information from sellers on its platform and officials asking for feedback on Facebook’s data practices.

Ms Vestager signalled in a speech yesterday that access to data could become a key theme for her next five-year term.

“We may need to require companies that control that data – such as platforms – to share the data they hold,” she said.

Ms Vestager said some sites “can collect data which gives them a picture of what’s going on in the market that others can’t match – not even the businesses that actually sell in that market”.

Regulators have sent questionnaires to websites and online businesses about Google’s data-gathering practices in recent days, news service MLex reported, without saying where it got the information.

Ms Vestager promised, when asked about Google’s $2.1bn (€1.9bn) bid for smartwatch maker Fitbit, to look closely at data-driven merger deals.

Google, which has faced multiple EU probes resulting in billions of euro of fines, said it would continue to engage with the EU and others “on this important discussion for our industry”.

The company uses “data to make our services more useful and to show relevant advertising, and we give people the controls to manage, delete or transfer their data,” a company spokeswoman said in an email.

Bloomberg

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