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Google-FitBit deal should go forward only with human rights due diligence, safeguards: Amnesty to EU

Global human rights NGO Amnesty International has asked the European Commission to block Google’s acquisition of wearables company FitBit, unless it integrates meaningful safeguards. The letter comes as the Commission's investigation into the deal for competition concerns is expected to close in early December.  In a letter addressed to the Commission’s competition policy chief Margrethe Vestager, the NGO said that the European Commission must ensure that the merger does not “proceed unless the two business enterprises can demonstrate that they have taken adequate account of the human rights risks and implemented strong and meaningful safeguards that prevent and mitigate these risks in the future”.  Google had announced its acquisition of FitBit over a year ago, but is yet to be cleared by European regulators. In February 2020, the European Data Protection Board had also raised privacy concerns with the deal, stating that the companies need to transparently carry out an assessment of the data protection requirements and privacy implications of the deal.  The FitBit merger is another clear example of Google’s “expansionist approach” to data extraction, it will simply aid the company to extend its data collection to the health and wearables sector, the human rights watchdog said in its letter.. “The sheer scale of the intrusion of Google’s business model into our private lives is an unprecedented interference with our privacy, and in fact has undermined the very essence of privacy,” it added.  Google is incentivised to merge and aggregate data across platforms, Amnesty International warned. With access to…

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