Standing Up For Your Rights: Action Against Unlawful Surveillance & Exploitation of Personal Data

Together, we protect our personal information from Google’s illegal surveillance and exploitation.
Stichting Bescherming Privacybelangen (Privacy Protection Stichting) is a Dutch foundation that fights for consumers’ privacy rights. The Foundation’s mission is to stop pervasive privacy violations: Google’s ongoing illegal surveillance of Dutch consumers and commercial exploitation of their personal data must stop.

The Foundation insists that Google fundamentally change its business practices. In addition, it demands financial compensation for all Dutch consumers who have been harmed by Google’s systematic violations of the law. To achieve these goals, the Foundation has joined forces with Consumentenbond.

Ada van der Veer, the Foundation’s president:“Consumer privacy is seriously at stake. Google constantly tracks consumers by collecting, processing and exploiting their personal data, without their consent. Google knows what you are doing, where you are, what you might want to do and what you may be thinking about.
With its services and products, Google is the most dominant data company in the world. You simply cannot avoid Google, while at the same time Google continuously observes and records the private activities, location data, interests and search behaviour of all its users.
Google aggregates the personal data it collects to build detailed profiles of consumers’ lives, which it uses to derive products and services it sells to third parties to feed its advertising business. Users are in the dark about the nature and extent of Google’s practices and have lost control and authority over their personal data. Google also stores this data in the United States without adequate protection from scrutiny by the U.S. government.
Google is violating privacy laws at an unprecedented scale. Its practices constitute illegal surveillance and illegal exploitation of personal data, with unknown impact on personal lives of its users now and in future.
Google’s practices are unacceptable and in violation of Dutch and European consumer and data protection law. The Foundation wants to force Google to stop this.”

The Foundation has invited Google to negotiate an appropriate collective resolution. Google informed the Foundation that, at this stage, it was not prepared to enter into discussions about a settlement that would satisfy the Foundation’s demands. Google indicated that it accepted that this would probably mean that the Foundation would soon initiate these proceedings. The Foundation and Consumentenbond’s joint press releases announcing the Action can be found here.

Visit ‘Our Action Against Google’ for more information on the Action. Visit ‘About Us’ for more information on the Foundation. Visit ‘Partners’ for more information on the partnerships of the Foundation. Visit ‘Aggrieved Parties’ for more information on who we represent and the ‘no cure, no pay’ arrangement.