New EPrivacy Complaint Takes On Advertising Emails Sent To Gmail Users, Alleges They Are Direct Marketing Emails
Having been a thorn in Facebook's side for nearly a decade, the European privacy watchdog continues to focus at least some of its detractors' attention on Google. A new email privacy complaint from the group alleges that promotional emails were sent to Gmail users without their consent, a violation of that directive.
Sponsored advertising emails placed in Gmail users' inboxes may violate the terms of the email privacy policy.Gmail users are no doubt familiar with the Spam folder, where (ideally) unsolicited advertising emails are sent. However, there is a special advertising email highlighted by Google itself, part of Gmail's monetization system. Either way, it's sent to the user's Gmail inbox, usually based on previous interests or companies the user has interacted with. Promotional emails are sometimes designed and placed in such a way that it gives the user the impression that they are subscribed to this company's marketing emails when in fact they are not.
Neub's complaint states that the email meets the definition of "direct marketing" email, at least as set out in the ePrivacy Directive. The email privacy complaint cites the European Court of Justice's decision that any marketing in email format meets the definition of advertising email; Under the terms of ePrivacy, companies must first collect user consent in order to send it.
Neub's position is that unless Gmail users give their consent to each of these specific companies, advertising email is spam and should not be legal. The email privacy complaint alleges that these emails are invalid simply because they were created or facilitated by Google. Promotional emails are labeled as such and are located at the top of the inbox, but are otherwise standard emails and can trick Gmail users into believing they are on the mailing list from the company they unsubscribed from or have recently made a one-time purchase. . .
Romain Robert, program director of noyb.eu, describes Gmail's scheme as "posters get paid to remove ads from your inbox and place the ads themselves." A similar ad system was recently introduced in the mobile version of Microsoft Outlook and could be affected if CNIL rules support noib electronic privacy complaints.
The electronic privacy complaint follows a series of CNIL decisions against GoogleFrance's main data privacy agency has by far the greatest interest in regulating big tech companies. This is one of the reasons why noyb filed an ePrivacy complaint in this country; another is that e-privacy measures do not require the same extensive international cooperation process as is required by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaint. Any GDPR complaint against a company like Google or Facebook usually leads to an investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commission, which has struggled for a slow investigation and disappointing proposed sanctions.
CNIL has taken a number of significant actions against Google, which generally result in electronic privacy complaints rather than the GDPR process. It has fined the company €50-150 million per incident for tracking files without proper user consent, unclear privacy policies and using "dark patterns" to guide users. choice. Google has been fined billions of dollars by the European Commission for antitrust issues, but has largely avoided privacy and GDPR concerns outside France.
noyb used CNIL for an earlier win against Google earlier this year, when it was able to prove that Google Analytics violated international data transfer rules previously set out in another complaint against Facebook. CNIL found that websites in those countries were unable to use Google Analytics because it returned potentially personally identifiable information to the search giant, which could be held individually accountable. Austria, the Netherlands and Italy have made similar decisions.
Google's Gmail advertising emails have been in controversy for almost a decade now. When the new policy went into effect in 2013, the company was accused of telling group events that Gmail users should not expect privacy. At the time, Google was sued for violating eavesdropping laws by scanning the content of users' emails for targeted ads. Google's position in the lawsuit is that information voluntarily transferred to third parties should not be covered up, citing a 1979 decree on wiretapping. The company announced in 2017 that it would stop scanning email content for targeted advertising purposes.
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