Google in New Privacy Probes
Regulators in the U.S. and European Union are investigating Google Inc. for bypassing the privacy settings of millions of users of Apple Inc.'s Safari Web browser, according to people familiar with the investigations. Google stopped the practice last month …
Context & Ripple Effects
This probe has a long tail: European data-privacy officials have been circling Google since at least May 2007, when they opened an inquiry into its data practices (EU data-privacy officials probing Google). The new investigations extend that scrutiny from what Google collects to how it collects it.
The trigger is a confirmed finding that Google tracked Safari users by circumventing the browser's privacy settings — affecting millions of Apple customers — and halted the practice about a month before regulators in both the U.S. and EU opened probes. The pickup across CNET and Gizmodo shows the story resonated well beyond policy circles, landing on consumer-tech audiences too.
First-order effects
- Google faces simultaneous formal investigations from U.S. and EU regulators over the same conduct, multiplying legal exposure and forcing it to defend one practice on two regulatory fronts at once.
Second-order effects
- Apple gains a competitive talking point with no action of its own required: a rival's ad-tracking was caught overriding Safari's default protections, which pressures other ad networks relying on workarounds to re-examine whether their own methods survive browser-level enforcement.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, browser makers rather than advertisers become the de facto enforcers of tracking consent — default settings harden, workaround-based tracking gets priced as regulatory risk, and cross-border data practices become a standing subject of coordinated U.S.-EU scrutiny of large platforms.
The trend: Web advertising's reliance on quietly engineered tracking workarounds is colliding with regulators who treat browser privacy settings as binding commitments, pushing the industry toward explicit-consent tracking.