So they are perfectly happy to admit liability and pay up, as long as they aren't forced to publicise that admission to the people that the court case itself was on behalf of.
This time, yes, because it's about privacy and the CNIL can't do much more than 150,000€.
But France also asks Google for 1 billion € of unpaid taxes over the last years, and this time I guess they will really try to avoid paying (hopefully they won't be able to, but we'll see).
American billion or European billion? In this case I think the distinction is important (I guess it's the first case... the latter would be... big, very big, hugely, mindbogglingly big)
Like I said, 1 billion €, so a "European billion". Yes it is a lot of money. But even more so is the amount of money that Google earned in France and managed not to declare to the fisc (the French tax administration).
Sure, it's almost the definition of tax (it should be less than the amount earned.) I hope they pay, it's not like we are floating in money in Europe currently.
To clarify, a European billion is an American trillion [1] (an American billion is a European milliard), which is why RBerenguel said "the latter would be... big, very big, hugely, mindbogglingly big."
The CE also decided that Google have to go with that. They said that anyway it's okay for Google to say that they do not agree with the decision and that they are waiting for the final decision of the "juge de fond"¹, alongside with the CNIL message (the apology) they have to display, so it won't be such a problem for there reputation.
The thing to know is that, since it is very difficult to quantify how much damage (in €) would be implied by the displayed apology, the CE would certainly not have maintained this punishment if they weren't almost sure that the "juge de fond" will take the same decision (otherwise France would have to reimburse an uncomputable amount).
¹ no idea how to translate "juge de fond" in English, but the idea is that this time it was a fast-track procedure in which Google asked to waive the sanction while waiting for the "deep" procedure to take place. This is what have been rejected by the CE.
They would have had argued to the Conseil d'État in order to get the sentence suspended while the European court decide on the matter. Its not enough to just send in an appeal to the European court, as sovereignty still matters.
This chain of events happened during the pirate bay trial, in which Swedish courts did not approve of suspending sentences while waiting for an European court decision. The suspects still sent in their request, but any decision the European could had made would be after the fact.
> Le Conseil d'État is a French institution whose decisions can be broken (sadly) by European courts.
It's not as simple as that. From what I have understood, there is a precise hierarchy of courts and the Conseil d'État is at the top of the administrative courts hierarchy. The only way to appeal their decision is to go one step higher which would be the European Court of Human Rights, and I don't see how Google could find a valid reason to get there with this issue.
With piles of money involved it's possible that the ECHR would find for a reduction of citizen's rights, but AFAIK that'd be a first. Usually they go the other way around, and pretty seriously so.
So then I suppose Google should have just given in to the Chinese government's demands for censorship, or the US government's demands for access to private data?
I don't agree with either of those things, but there is a point at which globalisation comes into conflict with sovereign nations.
The status of a company is one that is granted to it by a sovereign country, and sovereign countries establish through their legal and government systems how companies can act within their borders.
Once you're there... yes, Google should comply to any legal request. And in fact, they do... as requests for data issued under legal order are in fact complied with.
Companies are not above the law (and laws tend to exist at country level or through treaty across many countries). And if the law of a country says pay, then Google need to pay unless another law can trump it and says not to pay.
There's no two ways about it, companies must comply with the laws of whatever land they operate in.
What if that is the sole country you do business in and you are legally forbidden from closing your business (as can happen to a business that produces essential war materials)?
The problem that is that companies are not above the law, but they are even less above ethics. The primary reason that we argue that companies should follow the law is ethics and when ethics and the law are in conflict ethics always trumps the law.
You're running a hypothetical munitions factory whose sole client is the government and you're worrying about the ethics and morality of having to comply with the laws of that country?
Let's worry about the morals and ethics of operating that munitions factory before we get concerned with "unjust" laws.
Fair enough to make this argument, but I wouldn't call a fine for violating privacy laws as an example of "laws so hideous and offensive to human dignity, that they should never be obeyed." by any means...
To be clear, I'm not saying that Google should break the law. Instead, I'm saying that it's clearly the case that there are some bad laws in the world, and that its perfectly reasonable for companies to engage in advocacy to have those laws changed, rather than just rolling over and accepting them, for example the way that American tech companies have been releasing reports on the requests for data that they receive from the government in order to raise awareness of the issue.
I'm not even saying this necessarily applies to this exact situation - maybe the laws in France that Google was in violation of are good laws, in which case hopefully Google loses its appeal.
It's just ridiculous to say that companies should always just do whatever government tells them to do without question.
It's a bigger problem then that. Laws are not exactly straight white strings which you know everything about when you set foot on some country to begin operations. If some country takes you to task on some ridiculous convoluted third world laws ( may be I am exaggerating here ) , a company has every right to present its views in court rather then just suck it up for the sake of abiding by the law. Also, once you have set up operation in a country it is very hard to move out since it risks putting your millions of users off who have got used to your product.
Yeah, a third world law asking them to tell their users exactly what they will do with personal data they will send to a country that has notoriously no legal protection for them and a very active market in personal data and identity theft.
In this case, having google comply to the most restrictive law of the countries they are operating in would benefit the rest of the world. They are not asked to come to work naked. They are asked to explain their users who will be able to know of their secret homosexuality or the brand of their car.
Which is true -- just like the idealistic interpretations here of the reason laws and governments exist -- but neither are really based in reality.
Since "just stop doing business there" often isn't a realistic option for most businesses, big or small, you do what you can to work within the law while attempting to retain what seems to you a reasonable standard of ethics. That's a very gray position, but that's how the world is.
When politics and legislation are ideal and unchanging, then you can expect corporations to consistently comply with all laws in all places. Until then, it's unreasonable to make statements like this. It is, of course, your right to do so; just don't make the mistake of believing it reflects how business and government actually work.
Don't worry, (US) corporations will be able to sue (EU) states soon when they don't like their laws [1] . Line of argumentation: "Europe has an unreasonably high standard [in it's protective laws], and not one based on science" [2]
Well I am not sure what the result would be. The problem is that Americans see EU Directives as if they were Federal US law. They're not.
The EU can issue Directive, that laws that represent the strict minimum to comply. Then the individual state has to actually pass a national law that implements the directive.
Three options here. The state does not want to implement the law and get fined. The state implements the law following closely the Directive. Or it can go further than the directive, like, in the case of the French privacy law, add more requirements.
Our system as flaws but I'm not to kind on Google messing around it. It could very well set an unfortunate precedent. EU Directive are sometimes quite weak so it would be a problem to me that instead of representing the min they end up representing the max requirement.
Google is suing because they want EU to invalidate the French law. But I don't see how it could happen since AFAIK the French privacy laws predate the Directive by a quite large amount. Right now I think EU can only overrule a state law if it does not offer minimal citizen protection or if there are contradictions with the Directive. Not if they offer more protection.
As for a treaty allowing US corps to invalid EU Directives ... well, good for you but we still have national laws. I don't see how the invalidation of a Directive would invalidate automatically national law.
I might be wrong though. Would love input from someone more knowledgeable on the matter.
> But I don't see how it could happen since AFAIK the French privacy laws predate the Directive by a quite large amount.
And more importantly goes further than the directive in protecting citizen's rights. By comparison the french "garde à vue" — a form of police custody — is also ancient but it restricts citizen's defence rights far below the mandatory minimum and has gotten repeatedly hammered by the ECHR both indirectly (via similar turkic cases e.g. Salduz v Turkey and Dayanan v Turkey) and directly (e.g. Brusco v France, Vassis v France) as France (incorrectly) refused to consider the turkic cases applicable.
> When corporations trump nation-states, we're all screwed.
These days, I'm rather afraid that we've already reached that point - at least in the western world, most governments seem to have just become the corporations, infiltrated to the point of indistinguishability. I hope there's a way back, but I'm not particularly optimistic about it.
What happens if they don't pay and have no physical business in France? France to sue them in Ireland? French police to ask Ireland police for seizure? Are they really in a position of power to do that, and can they really recover a billion just by seizing an office?
"Well this isn't going to go well for Google. At least I sure hope it doesn't."
I sure hope it doesn't go well for Google either. It seems quite brazen, even arrogant, for Google to refuse paying a fine when it arguably tracks and records the behaviour of online users to an unprecedented degree. And Google does not tell users what they do with their data beyond the generic "we collect this information to improve services". What they do with your data and how they use it is different from simply stating what is collected (which is all that their privacy policies actually say).
Just to be clear, I don't believe Google does sinister things with the data it collects, but that doesn't mean it's ok for a company to collect informaion about users unfettered. And no other company has such a voracious appetite to track and record users online.
And this blog post is also bunk, way to keep that going:
Google is maintaining they haven't done wrong and are appealing the decision, so they've asked the court to stay any penalties until the appeals process is resolved. End Of Story.
> accepting the fine would have also involved making a public admission of guilt (...) and the company feels this would have "irreparably damaged" its reputation.
It probably would've. But if they don't want that loss of reputation, perhaps they should have followed the appropriate laws in the first place? Seems like this is kind of the point of a punishment.
Of course Google's feeling is that they should be able to do whatever they want with user's data and shouldn't have to tell anybody anything, and thus they believe privacy and data protection regimes are inappropriate.
Let's just wait for the time when US will sue a number of french companies for some sort of privacy violations and force french to drop their lawsuit against Google.
You'll have more sorrows after drinking some Beaujolais. It's incredible that this is one of the best known wine regions in France. At most barely-drinkable, Beaujolais is inferior to most French wine.
Bordeaux and Bourgogne (Burgundy) are the big ones[0]. Loire and Alsace are also known for more specific wine types.
That doesn't necessarily help much as within each regions exist complex classification systems (e.g. Bordeaux uses Châteaux, essentially winemakers, while Burgundy uses an m:n mapping of domaines (a winemaker) to terroir (a geographical area), there's quite a bit of variation across winemakers (and within one especially on generational shifts) and price is essentially useless a data point. And then you've got to decide whether you want "drink" wine drunk within a few years or "keep" wine which you'll grow over 5, 10, 20 years or more.
[0] Bordeaux is bigger, Bourgogne has more controlled designations of origin.
I like certain regions of Bordeaux: Saint-Emilion (it has also sub regions), Pomerol, Fronsac, etc.)
I also quite like Bourgogne. Good red wine. If you like white wine you should try Chablis and Macon Village.
Alsace has Gewurztraminer, which is definitely sweeter than Riesling. You can try it with spicy dishes, if you like.
Also I'm quite fond of Spanish Rioja.
I find wine quite expensive in the US but you can find good valued wine, especially if you can afford to store some of them for a few years before enjoying them.
This is partly about the insane European cookie directive [0] (cf. [1]). A problem with forced apologies is, when the crimes you're apologizing for are actually controversial political issues, it takes on the character of political speech.
"I'm sorry I stole from that guy" is an apology. "I'm sorry I hacked your computer without your consent, in violation of privacy law" -- meaning you set a browser cookie -- that's something else.
[0] "According to the watchdog, Google didn't adequately inform users about its data collection processes, nor did it obtain consent or tell users how long cookies would be installed on their machine."
64 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadBut France also asks Google for 1 billion € of unpaid taxes over the last years, and this time I guess they will really try to avoid paying (hopefully they won't be able to, but we'll see).
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+france+milliard+impot...
The anglosphere uses short scale billions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
I'd guess USA billion, as it's about taxes and taxes can't be bigger than what Google is worth...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
The thing to know is that, since it is very difficult to quantify how much damage (in €) would be implied by the displayed apology, the CE would certainly not have maintained this punishment if they weren't almost sure that the "juge de fond" will take the same decision (otherwise France would have to reimburse an uncomputable amount).
¹ no idea how to translate "juge de fond" in English, but the idea is that this time it was a fast-track procedure in which Google asked to waive the sanction while waiting for the "deep" procedure to take place. This is what have been rejected by the CE.
I think Google is not fighting for its reputation, but if they pay now they will open the door to more fines from over countries.
This chain of events happened during the pirate bay trial, in which Swedish courts did not approve of suspending sentences while waiting for an European court decision. The suspects still sent in their request, but any decision the European could had made would be after the fact.
It's not as simple as that. From what I have understood, there is a precise hierarchy of courts and the Conseil d'État is at the top of the administrative courts hierarchy. The only way to appeal their decision is to go one step higher which would be the European Court of Human Rights, and I don't see how Google could find a valid reason to get there with this issue.
that's more like it, if they cave now, there is a huge list of states that dream about taxing Google very hard. Google wont pay.
I don't agree with either of those things, but there is a point at which globalisation comes into conflict with sovereign nations.
The status of a company is one that is granted to it by a sovereign country, and sovereign countries establish through their legal and government systems how companies can act within their borders.
Once you're there... yes, Google should comply to any legal request. And in fact, they do... as requests for data issued under legal order are in fact complied with.
Companies are not above the law (and laws tend to exist at country level or through treaty across many countries). And if the law of a country says pay, then Google need to pay unless another law can trump it and says not to pay.
There's no two ways about it, companies must comply with the laws of whatever land they operate in.
There exist laws so hideous and offensive to human dignity, that they should never be obeyed.
EDITED: I am not talking about the google privacy case specifically, previous posts in this thread had widened the scope beyond this point.
The problem that is that companies are not above the law, but they are even less above ethics. The primary reason that we argue that companies should follow the law is ethics and when ethics and the law are in conflict ethics always trumps the law.
Let's worry about the morals and ethics of operating that munitions factory before we get concerned with "unjust" laws.
I'm not even saying this necessarily applies to this exact situation - maybe the laws in France that Google was in violation of are good laws, in which case hopefully Google loses its appeal.
It's just ridiculous to say that companies should always just do whatever government tells them to do without question.
In this case, having google comply to the most restrictive law of the countries they are operating in would benefit the rest of the world. They are not asked to come to work naked. They are asked to explain their users who will be able to know of their secret homosexuality or the brand of their car.
Since "just stop doing business there" often isn't a realistic option for most businesses, big or small, you do what you can to work within the law while attempting to retain what seems to you a reasonable standard of ethics. That's a very gray position, but that's how the world is.
When politics and legislation are ideal and unchanging, then you can expect corporations to consistently comply with all laws in all places. Until then, it's unreasonable to make statements like this. It is, of course, your right to do so; just don't make the mistake of believing it reflects how business and government actually work.
[1] http://www.euractiv.com/specialreport-eu-us-trade-talks/liti...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcoue-mlQxw&t=58
Google are suing France because they conform to EU Law rather than French law, and would like European courts to resolve the issue.
The EU can issue Directive, that laws that represent the strict minimum to comply. Then the individual state has to actually pass a national law that implements the directive.
Three options here. The state does not want to implement the law and get fined. The state implements the law following closely the Directive. Or it can go further than the directive, like, in the case of the French privacy law, add more requirements.
Our system as flaws but I'm not to kind on Google messing around it. It could very well set an unfortunate precedent. EU Directive are sometimes quite weak so it would be a problem to me that instead of representing the min they end up representing the max requirement.
Google is suing because they want EU to invalidate the French law. But I don't see how it could happen since AFAIK the French privacy laws predate the Directive by a quite large amount. Right now I think EU can only overrule a state law if it does not offer minimal citizen protection or if there are contradictions with the Directive. Not if they offer more protection.
As for a treaty allowing US corps to invalid EU Directives ... well, good for you but we still have national laws. I don't see how the invalidation of a Directive would invalidate automatically national law.
I might be wrong though. Would love input from someone more knowledgeable on the matter.
And more importantly goes further than the directive in protecting citizen's rights. By comparison the french "garde à vue" — a form of police custody — is also ancient but it restricts citizen's defence rights far below the mandatory minimum and has gotten repeatedly hammered by the ECHR both indirectly (via similar turkic cases e.g. Salduz v Turkey and Dayanan v Turkey) and directly (e.g. Brusco v France, Vassis v France) as France (incorrectly) refused to consider the turkic cases applicable.
These days, I'm rather afraid that we've already reached that point - at least in the western world, most governments seem to have just become the corporations, infiltrated to the point of indistinguishability. I hope there's a way back, but I'm not particularly optimistic about it.
I sure hope it doesn't go well for Google either. It seems quite brazen, even arrogant, for Google to refuse paying a fine when it arguably tracks and records the behaviour of online users to an unprecedented degree. And Google does not tell users what they do with their data beyond the generic "we collect this information to improve services". What they do with your data and how they use it is different from simply stating what is collected (which is all that their privacy policies actually say).
Just to be clear, I don't believe Google does sinister things with the data it collects, but that doesn't mean it's ok for a company to collect informaion about users unfettered. And no other company has such a voracious appetite to track and record users online.
The thought of anonymising your data is clearly too much for Google: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/google-keeps-your...
Devices in Sochi don't get hacked 'before you drink your coffee': http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/02/that-nbc-story-100-fraudul...
And this blog post is also bunk, way to keep that going:
Google is maintaining they haven't done wrong and are appealing the decision, so they've asked the court to stay any penalties until the appeals process is resolved. End Of Story.
It probably would've. But if they don't want that loss of reputation, perhaps they should have followed the appropriate laws in the first place? Seems like this is kind of the point of a punishment.
You'll have more sorrows after drinking some Beaujolais. It's incredible that this is one of the best known wine regions in France. At most barely-drinkable, Beaujolais is inferior to most French wine.
That doesn't necessarily help much as within each regions exist complex classification systems (e.g. Bordeaux uses Châteaux, essentially winemakers, while Burgundy uses an m:n mapping of domaines (a winemaker) to terroir (a geographical area), there's quite a bit of variation across winemakers (and within one especially on generational shifts) and price is essentially useless a data point. And then you've got to decide whether you want "drink" wine drunk within a few years or "keep" wine which you'll grow over 5, 10, 20 years or more.
[0] Bordeaux is bigger, Bourgogne has more controlled designations of origin.
I also quite like Bourgogne. Good red wine. If you like white wine you should try Chablis and Macon Village.
Alsace has Gewurztraminer, which is definitely sweeter than Riesling. You can try it with spicy dishes, if you like.
Also I'm quite fond of Spanish Rioja.
I find wine quite expensive in the US but you can find good valued wine, especially if you can afford to store some of them for a few years before enjoying them.
This is corporation versus civil rights in a free and democratic Western nation.
This is a level of greed driven arrogance that makes 90's Microsoft look like saints.
"I'm sorry I stole from that guy" is an apology. "I'm sorry I hacked your computer without your consent, in violation of privacy law" -- meaning you set a browser cookie -- that's something else.
[0] "According to the watchdog, Google didn't adequately inform users about its data collection processes, nor did it obtain consent or tell users how long cookies would be installed on their machine."
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/08/google-privacy-cnil-fine/
[1] https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=eu+cookie&sort...