Three lawmakers wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission that urges the agency to investigate Google on whether the online giant violated an agreement with the FTC. It was last week that the company had bypassed the privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser to install cookies even if the browser was set to block them.
Republican representatives Cliff Stearns of Florida and Joe Barton of Texas, as well as Democrat Edward Markey of Massachusetts said that the practice contradicted the privacy agreement that Google signed with the FTC last year. It required the company to introduce a full privacy program and prevented it from misrepresenting its privacy practices.
The FTC also received a letter regarding the same issue from the Electronic Privacy Information Center that suggested Google knew what it was doing. It said that Google pulled the relevant information from its web pages as soon as the issue blew up. It was said that Google circumvented Safari’s privacy safeguards and misrepresented the commercial value of the data it obtained.
It would be expensive for Google if the FTC investigates and finds it guilty. It would mean a fine of $16,000 per violation per day and would bring another round of scrutiny of the company’s plans to consolidate user data across its various services.
