Google accused of misleading consumers to grab more data for ads

Italy’s competition and consumer watchdog has announced an investigation into how Google gets users’ consent in order to link their activity across different services for ad profiling, saying it suspects the adtech giant of “unfair commercial practices.”

At issue here is how Google obtains consent from users in the European Union to link their activity across its apps and services — like Google Search, YouTube, Chrome and Maps. Linking user activity lets it profile them for ad targeting, the company’s main source of revenue.