Google (NSDQ: GOOG) had better hope former Tory shadow minister David Davis doesn’t return to a senior role in a future Conservative government. Its chief privacy counsel Peter Fleischer has given Davis a tongue-lashing for opposing Google Health and criticising Google’s privacy record.
Davis was writing in The Sunday Times in opposition to Tories’ wish to give citizens ownership and transportability of their health records. But a furious-sounding Fleischer, on Google’s European policy blog, lambast the “polemicists who abuse the truth” including Davis for his “extraordinary attack, riddled with misleading statements”.
Google Health isn’t yet available in the UK, Fleischer wrote, countering Davis’ views that Google is “hostile to privacy”, European privacy law “does not apply to it”, its Google.cn launch in China was an “amoral deal” and that Google is “exploiting its customers’ private data”.
The Tories are close to Google. David Cameron made a show of appointing CEO Eric Schmidt to an Obama-esque “economic recovery committee” in February (though this may have been just a paper committee), and he spoke at Google’s Zeitgeist event in both 2006 and 2007, before Brown got there in 2008. Davis was shadow home secretary for five years but has been merely a local MP since June 2008.