PARIS (Reuters) – Google Analytics, the world’s most popular web analytics tool built by Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), risks providing U.S. intelligence services with access to data from French website users, France’s watchdog CNIL warned.
The data privacy regulator, one of the most vocal and influential in Europe, said in a decision targeting an unnamed French website manager that the U.S. tech giant had not taken sufficient measures to guarantee data privacy rights under European Union regulation when data was transferred between Europe and the United States.
“These (measures) are insufficient to prevent this data from becoming accessible to US intelligence agencies,” the regulator stated in a statement.
“As a result, there is a danger for French website users who utilise this service and have their data exported.”
According to the CNIL, the French website manager in question had one month to comply with EU regulations, and similar orders had been given to other website owners.
Google did not respond to the CNIL ruling. Google Analytics does not follow users throughout the Internet, according to the company, and organisations who use it have discretion over the data they gather.
The CNIL’s judgement follows a similar one by its Austrian equivalent, which came in response to complaints by Vienna-based noyb (Non Of Your Business), an advocacy organisation formed by Austrian lawyer and privacy campaigner Max Schrems, who won a high-profile lawsuit with Europe’s highest court in 2020.
Because of similar concerns, the European Union’s Court of Justice cancelled the Privacy Shield, a transatlantic data transfer agreement relied on by thousands of enterprises for services ranging from cloud infrastructure to payroll and banking.
Because of the legal dangers posed to them, several significant corporations, notably Google and Meta s Facebook (FB.O), have asked for a new transatlantic data transfer agreement to be reached as soon as possible.
“In the long run, either we need sufficient safeguards in the US or we will wind up with different goods for the US and the EU,” Schrems stated in response to CNIL’s ruling.
“I would like better safeguards in the United States, but that is up to US legislators, not anybody in Europe.”
