Privacy Pressure Applied to Google, Gmail

Google's still-in-beta free e-mail service continues to experience pressure from privacy advocate groups.

Privacy International is the latest to step in line. The group filed a complaint Monday asking the privacy and data protection commissions in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Austria, Australia and Canada to investigate potential invasion of consumers’ privacy.

The international electronic privacy watchdog complained that the proposed service violates several statutes of the European Union’s Data Protection law. Even worse would be the dangerous precedent it would set, the complaint said. Noting that rival Web mail providers had already moved to offer more storage, Privacy International said that the trend toward increased storage and functionality set by Google “will fundamentally change the privacy expectation for electronic communication and will create additional security and data protection threats.”

Read more at Internet News.