France’s data protection regulator has launched an official investigation into Google’s new privacy policy. The French regulator (CNIL) has concerns about the policy, which doesn’t seem to conform to European data privacy laws.

CNIL has written to Google’s CEO Larry Page asking the search engine giant to postpone the launch of the new privacy policy while it conducts an inquiry. The letter says: “Our preliminary investigation shows that it is extremely difficult to know exactly which data is combined between which services for which purposes, even for trained privacy professionals.”

Google has defied this request, confirming that the new privacy policy will come into effect tomorrow (1 March) as planned. Google’s new privacy policy will merge all of a user’s browsing history, data, searches and contacts into one profile.

“We are confident that our simple, clear and transparent privacy policy respects all European data protection laws and principle,” wrote Peter Fleischer, Google’s chief privacy counsel in response.

CNIL has stated that it will send Google a list of questions by mid-March.

Posted by Smarayda Christoforou