Brian O'Donovan
speaker
42 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard today
Brian O'Donovan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So this is all as you say about location data.
So effectively if you use your Google Maps, if you use Google to browse, data is created.
Information is created.
Google can see where you are.
That's very, very sensitive and potentially valuable information because you can then use that information to infer your interests, or you can use that information to sell advertising to you and to push certain ads into your feeds.
Because it's valuable data and because it's very important data, it is protected by I'm sure a term that everybody knows now, the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation.
This is the EU's set of data protection rules.
And this information has to be kept safe, it has to be handled in a very
certain way and it has to be handled in a way that is fair and transparent.
So what happened here is that the Data Protection Commission back in February twenty twenty launched its own investigation into Google after receiving a number of complaints from European consumer watchdogs across Europe because remember the reason Ireland is involved here is because Google is headquartered in Ireland, so it is the data protection commission here in Dublin that has to investigate Google.
It launched this investigation and it found, David, that there were failures.
And in a statement today, the Data Protection Commission has said that failures by Google in the way it handled this location information meant that people could have been unaware that their location was being used to influence them with ads or to infer their interests.
And it also meant that people could lose control over their personal data, the retention of users' location data.
data for longer than necessary aggravated this loss of control, the Data Protection Commission said in a statement issued in the last hour.
Interestingly, David, Google has issued a statement also in the last few minutes, very short, just two lines, basically saying this is historic.
We have fixed these problems.
They're saying since twenty nineteen we've introduced a range of measures to make sure that it is more fair and it is more transparent and it is possible to switch off these location services when you're talking about your Google Maps or your Google browsers or your Android phones.
They're saying this is also
School stuff.
It has been fixed.
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