by Mathieu Rosemain
PARIS (Reuters) – Google breached a European Union court order by sending unsolicited advertising emails to users of the Gmail email service, Austrian advocacy group noyb.eu said on Wednesday in a complaint filed with the National Commission for Computing and Liberties (CNIL) in France.
The Alphabet subsidiary, whose bulk of its revenue comes from online advertising, would need to obtain consent from its Gmail users before it could send them emails “for direct marketing purposes”, noyb.eu said in his complaint, citing a 2021 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
These emails have only two characteristics that set them apart from others: the words “announcement” in green letters on the left side, under the subject of the email, and the absence of a date, the advocacy group said.
Neither Google nor the Cnil immediately responded to a request for comment.
Vienna-based noyb.eu (Non Of Your Business) is a lobby group founded by Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer and privacy activist who won a high-profile case in Europe’s highest court in 2020 .
The Cnil, reputed to be one of the strictest personal data regulators in Europe, in January imposed a record fine of 150 million euros on Google for not having respected the legislation governing the use of “cookies”. .
(Report Mathieu Rosemain, French version Laetitia Volga, edited by Bertrand Boucey)
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