Google Agrees to Data Portability Commitments in Italy, Easing Users’ Ability to Take Their Data Elsewhere

Italy’s competition authority, the AGCM, has settled its investigation of Google’s data portability practices after the tech giant made commitments to make it easier for users to take their data elsewhere. The probe was initiated following a complaint from Weople, a local company that operates a direct marketing platform. Weople claimed that Google’s data portability offer, known as Takeout, was complicated and discouraged users from transferring their data to other platforms. The company wanted to streamline the data portability process because its service relies on users transferring data from social media platforms and loyalty card schemes to populate virtual data deposit boxes. Weople encrypts and tokenizes the data in these boxes to use for targeted marketing without sharing personal data or identity with advertisers. In response to the complaint, Google has made three commitments to ease data portability. The first commitment involves providing third parties with a URL that can be embedded in their applications to automate the Takeout process. The second commitment includes making more detailed documentation available to third parties regarding data fields related to users’ web searches, Chrome browsing history, and YouTube. Finally, Google has pledged to provide early access to a new service-to-service direct portability API it is developing. The AGCM deemed that these commitments resolved the competition concerns and appointed an independent monitoring trustee to oversee Google’s compliance. The settlement is expected to benefit users by making it easier for them to transfer their data, especially since Google will release an API to automate the data portability process next year. These commitments are likely part of Google’s efforts to comply with the pan-EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires gatekeepers to support market contestability through data portability.