Who’d be a big American web company in Europe?
Two of the biggest, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Facebook, have been facing scrutiny in the union over the last year or two, and the heat is getting hotter…
A Hamburg data protection officer says he has begun legal proceedings against the social network after receiving “many” complaints that it has been storing details of people who have not even registered with the site.
In April, Facebook changed settings to allow people to withhold access to contacts in their email accounts, but the officer says previously-accessed contacts have not been erased by Facebook, which is therefore “against data privacy laws”, AP reports the officer saying.
Speaking about a preliminary inquiry launched in February in response to complaints about Google, the European Commission’s competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia told a conference in London on Wednesday (via Reuters):