"The European Commission is preparing to compel Google to stream search data to third-party companies through an automated API. It is doing this under the Digital Markets Act, a regulation with a sound goal of improving competition in digital markets. But this specific proposal would have the effect of exposing the EU users’ individual Google search queries to unspecified companies that users have no knowledge of, or control over.
Unless the EC corrects the proposal, it will amount to one of the largest mandated transfers of sensitive user data in Europe in decades, making the privacy problem immediate and sizeable. Receiving access to this data would be very easy for other companies, requiring them only to jump through bureaucratic and procedural hoops, rather than ensuring that the shared data is properly anonymized and aggregated to prevent harm to users (the EC has proposed some measures on this front, but they are woefully inadequate, as discussed at length in this post). This immediately creates a national-security problem because once this feed is available to qualifying third parties, all a hostile foreign intelligence service needs to do to gain detailed intelligence on the individual searches of all EU citizens is to obtain access through a formally compliant search engine, AI-search wrapper, a mock AI chatbot, or funded front company. Pulling this off is very easy, even easier than registering a bogus company to access Real-Time Bidding data from Google in 2015, back when nobody cared about security and privacy of this layer.
My 15+ yr experience lets me confidently ring an alarm bell here. It’s a privacy and a national and international security risk. One of the biggest risks in Europe this year."
https://techletters.substack.com/p/the-european-commission-is-turning
#EU #DMA #Google #Search #Privacy #CyberSecurity
Greenpeace International
Juha Haataja
tante
kim_harding ✅
Miguel Afonso Caetano
Primetime