Campaigner for privacy NOYB (none of your business), has filed a GDPR complaint against Google’s Privacy Sandbox, claiming that the US megacorp tracked users without their consent when they enabled a “Privacy Feature” in the Chrome browser.
NOYB founder Max Schrems confirmed the allegation in a statement on Thursday.
According to the statement, to safeguard customer privacy, the American tech giant is gradually eliminating third-party cookies, which are used by marketers to track users.
Rather, it has unveiled a suite of technologies known as the Privacy Sandbox, which keeps developers and publishers from tracking specific users while restricting data sharing with third parties and blocking hidden tracking methods.
NOYB has brought multiple concerns about purported privacy violations by large tech corporations to the attention of national and EU privacy watchdogs.
“People thought they were agreeing to a privacy feature but were tricked into accepting Google’s first-party ad tracking. Consent has to be informed, transparent, and fair to be legal. Google has done the exact opposite,” said Schrems in a statement.
Understandably, users could believe that turning on the “ad privacy feature” would shield them from surveillance. In reality, though, it activates first-party tracking.
Noyb wrote today: “Google’s internal browser tracking was introduced to users via a pop-up that said ‘turn on ad privacy feature’ after opening the Chrome browser. In the European Union, users are given the choice to either ‘Turn it on’ or to say ‘No thanks,’ so to refuse consent.”
According to NOYB, Google should first obtain users’ agreement as required by EU privacy regulations before implementing the functionality, which enables the corporation to follow users within the browser.
We earlier reported that NYOB filed a formal complaint alleging that Microsoft education software, which is extensively used in schools around Europe, is probably tracking hundreds of thousands of students.