WASHINGTON, April 9 (by Karin Zeitvogel for RIA Novosti) – Google was under fire Tuesday from rival tech companies, including Microsoft, who say the California tech giant is handing over customers’ private data to app developers and using unfair practices to dominate the mobile marketplace in Europe.
“Google collects personal information and gives it to independent software vendors, or app providers,” Microsoft’s Greg Sullivan, a senior manager for Windows Phone, told RIA Novosti as Microsoft rolled out the latest in a series of attack ads against Google, called “Scroogled.”
“They don’t communicate what they’re doing and you have no ability to opt out,” he said, adding that the “Scroogled” campaign, which launched in November, aims to “educate folks about this pattern of behavior at Google, where they don’t respect users’ privacy.”
In the ads, Microsoft says its Windows Phone Store does not pass on users’ private information, urging visitors to give Windows’ app store and Bing search engine a try.
Around two-thirds of online searches made from computers at home or work in the United States used Google last year, with Microsoft’s Bing search engine used just 16.5 percent of the time, said comScore, which monitors all things digital, in a report released in January.
Google also clearly dominates in the much smaller but rapidly growing mobile search market, where it controls 96 percent of the search ad segment, according to eMarketer.
But Sullivan said the “Scroogled” campaign appears to be working, with nearly four million visitors viewing the videos on the site in five months and a questionnaire on scroogled.com shows that “people’s perceptions of Google have plummeted by 39 percent” in the months since the attack ads started.
A study that Microsoft commissioned with the polling company JFK Roper found that 87 percent of users were “unaware that a major app store shares their information,” Sullivan said. The same study found that 91 percent disapproved of the personal data sharing that Google is accused of.
Microsoft and 16 other companies are also taking on Google overseas. On Tuesday, they filed a complaint against Google with the European Commission, which handles antitrust cases for the 27 nations represented on the commission.
The coalition which filed the antitrust complaint, and calls itself FairSearch, says Google dominates the smartphone market because it gives the Android operating system to device-makers for free. The complaint calls the practice “predatory” and says it has put other providers at a disadvantage.
“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” said Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel to the FairSearch coalition.
“But in reality, Android phone makers who want to include must-have Google apps such as Maps, YouTube or Play are required to pre-load an entire suite of Google mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone,” a brief summary of the complaint, which was sent to RIA Novosti by FairSearch said.
Vinje urged the European Commission to act quickly to nip Google’s anticompetitive practices in the bud, warning that: “Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance.”
Google is also being investigated in Europe for allegedly abusing its dominance in desktop search advertising after regulators complained that Google searches tend to link back to the California company’s own services.
Google was not immediately available for comment on any of the allegations against it.
Updated at 23:40 with correct, edited, version
