By Natalia Drozdiak
FRANKFURT--German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said
Google Inc. (GOOG) and other Internet companies should be banned
from building profiles of customers using their personal data,
according to a media report Sunday.
"We need additional tools that enable meaningful use of Big Data
but we also need to prevent the creation of customer profiles," Mr.
de Maiziere told the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung. He said he wanted to ban Internet companies from gathering
customer data and then selling those profiles.
Google handles more than 90% of Web searches in Europe and is
still managing a series of continuing disputes with European
privacy regulators who have argued for more than two years that the
company's privacy policy violates European law. The Silicon Valley
company has embarked on a two-month tour of Europe as part of a
broader effort to assuage some of those critics.
"If a user allows Google to access their location in order to
calculate a route's distance, then they probably don't mean to give
Google consent to create a profile of their movements," Mr. de
Maiziere said of the data profiles. Still, he backed "harmless"
uses of information-gathering without consent, such as collecting
anonymous health data.
Under European Union law, companies can only gather personal
data under strict conditions and must protect it from misuse. In
March, the European Parliament voted to increase the fines to 5%
from 2% of global turnover for companies who abuse customers' data.
European governments are set to vote on the adoption of the new
data-protection legislation in October.
Mr. de Maiziere said Europe has a great opportunity to establish
a "Made in Europe" security standard that could then be copied
world-wide. Given the rapid change of technology, however, he
suggested initially limiting the term for the data-protection law
to five years.
Write to frankfurt.priority@dowjones.com
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