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Google to meet EU investigators over privacy concerns

French data protection authorities will go face-to-face with Google representatives next week as part of a EU investigation into the search giant's new privacy policy.The meeting on 23 May has been set up because the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL) is "not totally satisfied" with the answers they have been given so far, the watchdog's head Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin told Reuters.
Written by Karen Friar, Contributor

French data protection authorities will go face-to-face with Google representatives next week as part of a EU investigation into the search giant's new privacy policy. The meeting on 23 May has been set up because the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL) is "not totally satisfied" with the answers they have been given so far, the watchdog's head Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin told Reuters.

In March, it emerged that EU officials had asked CNIL to look into the privacy implications of Google's revised policy, which allows the company to mix-and-match an individual's data across all of its services and use this to deliver targeted advertising.

"We want to untangle the precise way that specific personal data is being used for individual services, and examine what the benefit for the consumer really is," Falque-Pierrotin told Reuters.

In its initial approach to Google, the French regulators said they had "strong doubts" as to whether the company's processing of the merged data was fair and lawful. They also said they were concerned that it did not comply with Articles 6 and 7 of the EU's Data Protection Directive.

The news of the meeting coincides with the launch on Thursday of the Knowledge Graph, Google's move to integrate semantic understanding into its search tool. The new feature, currently only available in the US, looks at past queries and other data to understand the context of a search request and so deliver more-relavant results.

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