Global Marketing News – 5th August 2015
Google faces prosecution after defying French court
Google has said that it will not be complying with an order issued by the French data privacy watchdog, the CNIL.
Last month, the CNIL ordered Google to remove links from all of its domains under the “EU right to be forgotten” law.
The “right to be forgotten” law means that EU citizens can ask Google to remove links to webpages containing incorrect or outdated information about them if these results appear when the person’s name is typed into the search engine.
Google has been complying with these requests, but has only been removing links concerning French individuals from its google.fr search results. The links still appear if you search for the person’s name using any other Google domain, including google.com.
In mid-June, the French data watchdog ruled that this practice was unlawful and gave Google 15 days to remove inaccurate and outdated links from all of its Google domains.
Google’s failure to comply with the request means that the search engine faces possible financial sanctions, although it is unclear how large any fine would be.
Google has asked the CNIL to withdraw its complaint, arguing that “no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access”. The CNIL has two months to decide whether to drop its request or pursue financial sanctions against the search engine.
Korean prosecutors accessing Naver users’ private data
The leading South Korean search engine Naver has released a transparency report revealing that requests from South Korean prosecutors to access user data have increased by 18% compared to 2 years ago.
In the first 6 months of this year, it received just over 5,000 court orders asking for personal user information such as IDs, sign-in records and dialogues, compared to around 4,300 requests in the same period 2 years earlier.
It complied with 86% of requests, including 14 requests to wiretap communications between suspected criminals.
The revelations come amidst growing discontent in South Korea about online surveillance undermining privacy.
Naver’s main rival in the South Korean search engine market, Daum Kakao, recently announced that it would no longer grant prosecution requests to wiretap its users, after a public backlash following the publication of its own transparency report.
Indian ecommerce market expecting huge growth
India’s ecommerce market is set to grow ten-fold in the next 10 years, according to the Indian e-retailer Snapdeal.
The Indian ecommerce market is currently worth an estimated 25 billion US dollars, but this could hit 250 billion by 2025 as the market grows at a compound annual growth rate of 35%.
This is good news for Snapdeal, which has a 35% share of the Indian ecommerce market. If it retains its current market share, it will be looking at profits of 75 billion US dollars within the next decade.
Highlighting the rapid growth of the Indian ecommerce market, Snapdeal said: “It took us three years to get the first 100,000 sellers, [but] the next 100,000 will come in in just six months. That’s how exponential India’s growth [is]… I think India is taking to online buying and selling at a pace that even China did not see.”
Kenyan hotels need to get online
And finally, the African online hotel booking site Jovago has said that Kenyan hotels need to make more of an effort to have a website if they want to attract more tourists.
The number of tourists visiting Kenya has dropped by almost 20% this year compared to last year, a trend blamed on a perceived lack of security in the country.
In order to step up to the challenge and attract more tourists, Jovago has said that “Africa needs to step out of the comfort zone and position her products online where the customer is most likely to be found”.
Currently, 1,600 Kenyan hotels are listed on the Jovago website, a fairly small number considering 25,000 hotels are listed throughout Africa.
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