Internet Firms Should Be Banned From Building Customer Profiles on Personal Data: German Minister

FRANKFURT--German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said Google Inc. (GOOG) and other Internet companies should be banned from building profiles of customers using their personal data, according to a media report Sunday.

"We need additional tools that enable meaningful use of Big Data but we also need to prevent the creation of customer profiles," Mr. de Maiziere told the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He said he wanted to ban Internet companies from gathering customer data and then selling those profiles.

Google handles more than 90% of Web searches in Europe and is still managing a series of continuing disputes with European privacy regulators who have argued for more than two years that the company's privacy policy violates European law. The Silicon Valley company has embarked on a two-month tour of Europe as part of a broader effort to assuage some of those critics.

"If a user allows Google to access their location in order to calculate a route's distance, then they probably don't mean to give Google consent to create a profile of their movements," Mr. de Maiziere said of the data profiles. Still, he backed "harmless" uses of information-gathering without consent, such as collecting anonymous health data.

Under European Union, companies can only gather personal data under strict conditions and must protect it from misuse. In March, the European Parliament voted to increase the fines to 5% from 2% of global turnover for companies who abuse customers' data. European governments are set to vote on the adoption of the new data-protection legislation in October.

Mr. de Maiziere said Europe has a great opportunity to establish a "Made in Europe" security standard that could then be copied world-wide. Given the rapid change of technology, however, he suggested initially limiting the term for the data-protection law to five years.

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