Google has been accused by its competitor in the browser space, Brave, of secretly funneling the personal data of its users to advertisers, according to a report in the Financial Times.
New evidence submitted to European regulators accuses the tech giant of circumventing E.U. rules on privacy, as well as undermining the companies own privacy guarantees to its users.
The material was submitted by Johnny Ryan, chief policy officer of the pro-privacy web browser Brave, and accuses Google of using hidden web pages to feed data to advertisers without users’ knowledge or consent.
Mr Ryan found that Google had labelled him with an identifying tracker that it fed to third-party companies that logged on to a hidden web page. The page showed no content but had a unique address that linked it to Mr Ryan’s browsing activity. Using the tracker from Google, which is based on the user’s location and time of browsing, companies could match their profiles of Mr Ryan and his web-browsing behaviour with profiles from other companies, to target him with ads. Mr Ryan found six separate pages pushing out his identifier after a single hour of looking at websites on Google’s Chrome browser.
In a comment to the FT, a Google spokesperson denied the allegations:
A spokesperson for Google said the company had not seen the details of the information sent by Mr Ryan to the regulator and that it was co-operating with investigations in Ireland and the UK into its advertising business. The spokesperson added: “We do not serve personalised ads or send bid requests to bidders without user consent.”
The latest allegations of privacy violations from Google come as the company faces fines of $136 million in the U.S. from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to settle allegations that YouTube, owned by Google, violated child privacy laws.
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Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.