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Content type: News & Analysis
Today, the European Commission has concluded its Phase II in-depth review of the proposed acquisition of the health and fitness tracker Fitbit by Google, deciding that the merger can go through. While we welcome the commitments put forward by Google to mitigate some risks of compromising individuals' rights and competition, PI considers the effects of this merger will further strengthen Google's capacity to exploit our data.
On 15 June 2020, Google formally notified the European Commission of…
Content type: Examples
Civil society organisations Civil Liberties union for Europe, Open Rights Group and Panoptykon Foundation have filed complaints against Google and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) member companies in Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Portugal and Romania.
The complaints address privacy abuses arising from real-time bidding processing, and call on data protection authorities to work together in investigation the real-time bidding industry.
Content type: News & Analysis
Today, the CNIL announced fines of €100 million and €35 million for Gooogle and Amazon, respectively, for breaches of the French Data Protection Act.
The fines resulted from two separate investigations carried out by CNIL in relation to the use of cookies on the French websites of Google and Amazon.
The decision against Google
While it seems to be broadly stated that the CNIL fined Google €100 million, a more accurate statement is that the CNIL fined Google LLC (the parent company of Google’…
Content type: Examples
French data protection regulator CNIL fined Google and Amazon €100 million and €35 million respectively for breaches of the French Data Protection Act. The CNIL found that the French websites of Google and Amazon had not sought the prior consent of visitors before advertising cookies were saved on computers, and failed to provide clear information to users as to how they intended to make use of online trackers and how to refuse any use of cookies.
In relation to Google, the CNIL made an…
Content type: Guide step
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are geographically distributed network of proxy servers that seek to provide features such as better availability and performances for websites. While the goal is commendable, it also means that these CDN providers receive metadata related to the websites you visit (where they are setup). With this is mind, you might want to sacrifice the added convenience and avoid large CDN providers (such as Google and Cloudflare) to prevent them from obtaining any data…
Content type: Guide step
Browser cookies allow websites to preserve session data such as your login credentials or items in your shopping basket so that you don't lose information when you close the page. Unfortunately, they are often abused to track your online activity across the web. Using a dedicated addon, you can clean your cookies regularily to ensure that no unwanted cookie is kept in your browser, limiting the efficienty of online trackers.
This guide explains how to install Cookie AutoDelete, a web-browser…
Content type: Guide step
Atención: Chrome es un producto de Google y, como tal, incorpora muchos mecanismos que posiblemente estén compartiendo datos con Google. Uno de estos mecanismos vincula automáticamente tu navegador a tu cuenta de Google cuando inicias una sesión en cualquier servicio de Google (por ejemplo, Gmail). Para evitar que esto suceda, considera usar Firefox o una alternativa basada en Chrome (por ejemplo, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave...). Otra posibilidad es seguir las indicaciones de esta guía para…
Content type: Guide step
Warning: Chrome is a Google product and as such embeds many mechanisms that might share data with Google. One such mechanism automatically links your browser to your Google account when you sign in on any Google service (e.g. Gmail). Consider using Firefox or a Chrome-based alternative (e.g. Vivaldi, Opera, Brave...) to avoid this. Alternatively you can disable some of these behaviours in the settings by following this guide.
Changing settings in Chrome menu
To access the settings, click on…
Content type: Guide step
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are geographically distributed network of proxy servers that seek to provide features such as better availability and performances for websites. While the goal is commendable, it also means that these CDN providers receive metadata related to the websites you visit (where they are setup). With this is mind, you might want to sacrifice the added convenience and avoid large CDN providers (such as Google and Cloudflare) to prevent them from obtaining any data…
Content type: Guide step
Las redes de distribución de contenidos (CDN) son redes geográficamente distribuidas de servidores proxy que buscan ofrecer funciones como mejorar la disponibilidad y el rendimiento de los sitios web. Aunque el objetivo es loable, también implica que los proveedores de CDN reciben metadatos vinculados con los sitios web que visitas (donde están configurados). Por ello, quizá sea conveniente sacrificar estas ventajas adicionales y prescindir de los grandes proveedores de CDN (como Google y…
Content type: News & Analysis
Banning TikTok? It's time to fix the out-of-control data exploitation industry - not a symptom of it
Chinese apps and tech companies have been at the forefront of the news recently. Following India's ban of 59 chinese apps in July, President Trump announced his desire to ban TikTok, shortly followed by his backing of Microsoft's intention to buy the US branch of its parent company ByteDance. Other than others lip syncing his public declaration, what does President Trump fear from this app, run by a firm, based in China?
It's all about that data
One clear answer emerges: the exploitation of…
Content type: Advocacy
Introduction
In February 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) commenced an investigation into the proposed acquisition of Fitbit by Google, which was originally announced in November 2019.
In March 2020, we made a submission to the ACCC, arguing that the acquisition would very likely have onerous implications for both consumers and markets. We asked the Australian regulator to apply strict scrutiny and not let hisory once again repeat itself. We concluded that the…
Content type: News & Analysis
In September 2019, PI published the report Your Mental Health for Sale. Our investigation looked into popular mental health websites and their data sharing practices.
Our findings suggest that, at the time of the research, most websites we looked at were using third party tracking for advertising purposes, sometimes relying on programmatic advertising technologies such as Real Time Bidding (RTB), sharing personal data with potentially thousands of actors. Some websites were also found sharing…
Content type: Long Read
Monday, 16 June 2025
It’s 7:33 am. Lila’s GoogBit watch vibrates. “You got 6 hours and 57 minutes of sleep last night, including 2 hours and 12 minutes of deep sleep”, the watch reads. “In total, you tossed and turned for 15 minutes only”. Taking into account Lila’s online browsing activity, her sleep pattern, the recent disruptions in some of her other biorhythms, as well as her daily schedule, GoogBit watch has calculated the very best minute to wake her up.
Content type: Long Read
Photo by Cade Roberts on Unsplash
For those of you who don't spend the most productive part of your day scanning the news for developments about data and competition, here's what has been going on in the UK since summer 2019.
Basically, the UK competition authority started an investigation into online platforms and digital advertising last summer, and issued their preliminary findings in December 2019, concluding that Facebook and Google are very powerful in the search engine and social media…
Content type: Advocacy
For a long but fun analysis of the current competition and data state of play in the UK, click here.
Background
PI broadly welcomes the CMA’s interim findings, many of which correspond with issues of longstanding concern to PI and with the points raised in our response to the CMA’s Statement of Scope.
This includes the indication that Google and Facebook have a dominant or strategic position in major elements of the digital advertising market which can -at least, partially- be attributed to the…
Content type: Guide step
Google is enormous and is expert at accumulating data. Its main source of revenue is advertising. The company dominates search, has a dominant web browser Chrome, owns YouTube (and many other companies), is the designer/develop of Android, the operating system that runs on nearly 75% of global smart phones.Below is a set of steps you can take if you wish to minimise ad targeting when using Google.1. Go to gmail.com and sign in
Content type: Advocacy
Background
In February 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) commenced an investigation into the proposed acquisition of Fitbit by Google, which was originally announced in November 2019.
Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, in 2018, generated 85% of its $136.22 billion in revenue from delivering targeted advertisements, has a past of competition law infringements in the European Union. Fitbit is a company that produces and sells health tracking technologies and…
Content type: Report
The changes discussed in this article are based on a second analysis performed in late November, 3 months after the original study Your Mental Health is for Sale and following the exact same methodology. All data collected can be found at the bottom of this page.
Change is possible
Back in September 2019 we published the report Your Mental Health is for Sale exposing how a majority of the top websites related to mental health in France, Germany and the UK share data for advertising purposes.…