EU regulators request that Google halt privacy policy changes

Google has come under quite a bit of fire recently over the upcoming revamped privacy policy, and now they’re getting some heat from European Union regulators.

According to a report by Reuters, European Union regulators sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page asking the company to refrain from implementing the privacy policy changes until the implications behind the change are fully understood.

“Given the wide range of services you offer, and the popularity of these services, changes in your privacy policy may affect many citizens in most or all of the EU member states,” members of the Article 29 working group said in a letter to Page.

“We wish to check the possible consequences for the protection of the personal data of these citizens in a coordinated way,” the group said, adding that the investigation would be headed up by French data protection firm CNIL.

“In light of the above, we call for a pause in the interests of ensuring that there can be no misunderstanding about Google’s commitments to information rights of their users and EU citizens, until we have completed our analysis.”

Despite pressure from the European Uninion regulators, Google has no plans to back down. Google Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer issued a response to the group, saying that while it would be happy to discuss the matter further with the CNIL, the company will not halt the rollout of its new privacy policy.

“As you will know, we had extensively pre-briefed data protection authorities across the EU prior to the launch of our notification to users on 24 January 2012,” Fleischer wrote. “At no stage did any EU regulator suggest that any sort of pause would be appropriate. Since we finished these extensive briefings, we have notified over 350 million Google account holders, as well as providing highly visible notices to all our non-authenticated users.”