Italian watchdog investigates cloud services Google, Apple and Dropbox

The Italian competition authority AGCM is investigating the data collection at Google Drive, Apple iCloud and Dropbox. The investigations concern alleged unfair trade practices and consumer rights violations.

According to the AGCM, six investigations have been opened against the cloud services. The unfair practices investigations at Google and Apple concern the collection and use of data for commercial purposes. The providers would not or insufficiently indicate this to the users. The same complaints also apply to Dropbox, but that service would also not have provided clear information about the conditions and procedures for canceling a subscription.

Furthermore, the AGCM criticizes a number of contractual conditions of the companies. Thus, the services give themselves broad rights to stop or interrupt the service and release themselves from liability in case of loss of documents. According to the authority, these may be unfair trading practices. The watchdog also criticizes the fact that there is more emphasis on the English-language contract text than the Italian version.