How “Technical Experts” Affect the Acquisition of Google-Fitbit

Last November, Google acquired Fitbit for $ 2.1 billion, and regulators and supporters began to look at potential privacy and antitrust issues before the dotted line dried up.

Google sought to alleviate these concerns in Europe by submitting a package to the European Commission. Within this package, Google has provided a set of commitments on how to use your Fitbit data. Google has promised not to use Fitbit data in the European Economic Region for targeted advertising to maintain data silos of Google and Fitbit information and to maintain other efforts centered around the Web and Android application programming interfaces. did.

The European Commission has accepted these promises and has begun a search to find an organization that monitors Google over the allotted 10-year monitoring period. The company happened to flag privacy firmly.

ING Bank, the acquisition monitoring trustee, has nominated Sentinel as a technical expert in Google-Fitbit trading. In this position, Sentinel ensures that Google keeps its promises and notifies ING of all progress when it is submitted to the European Commission.

“We’ve been working with Google, ING, and a few Fitbit engineers over the last few weeks to see some of the ways this is implemented. We first understood it from a high level, but then. We’ll actually dig deeper and meet with engineers in these different areas to see how they work, “said Sentinel President and Co-Founder Aaron Weller, CIPP / US. , CIPM, CIPT, FIP said.

In January, a month after the European Commission agreed to the tech company’s promise, Google’s outside lawyer consulted Sentinel to become a potential candidate for that role. In March, ING and Sentinel reached an informal agreement with a privacy technology vendor to serve as a technical expert, and work began.

Sentinel is tasked with providing a biannual report on Google’s practices, with the first report scheduled for July. This does not mean that the process or procedure is final. In fact, it wasn’t far from the truth.

“Fitbit and Google still have separate data stores, so some work is still underway,” Weller said. “We can consider the plan, but the system is not yet in place because the data is not ready to be used for those purposes. In such cases, we have what is currently available. We’re researching and understanding the timeline. It’s a 10-year effort, so we’ll do it every 6 months over a 10-year period to assess what the different areas look like. “

Weller said one of the challenges Sentinel faces is that it will almost certainly be able to meet the changes that will occur in the next decade. Google ads change. Fitbit devices will change, and the two companies and Sentinel personnel will fluctuate over a decade. Many things change from report to report. The information Sentinel provides in July could be more abstract than the information it provides in January as Google and Fitbit establish a new deal.

Another area Weller expects to encounter some resistance is the complexity of commitments. Weller thinks when he reads the promise, as if he first looked at the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Even with the first pass-through and all the supplementary guidance at its disposal, Weller said some readings were needed for Sentinel to truly understand the inside and outside of the commitment.

Weller assists organizations that are not familiar with the complexity of their commitment to file complaints. This may add additional work.

“One of the things I think we’ll come across is the other players on the market. Players who haven’t done that level of analysis of what Google actually promised will complain. We have time to determine if the complaint is valid, “Weller said. “I don’t know what the volume will be.”

Antitrust concerns are the main focus for all parties involved in the arrangement, but as Weller points out, privacy plays an important role in the process.

And the procedure is beginning to catch the eye of many other entities. Weller said the European Commission’s approach is new and the setup with Google could be a test case for future mergers and acquisitions. He added that he heard anecdotal stories from global regulators paying attention to the success of the European Commission’s plan with Google.

Weller believes that if the deal is fruitful, privacy will be important for both this acquisition and future M & A and antitrust issues.

“Privacy is not an island,” Weller said. “There are a lot of adjacencies and skills that you wouldn’t think of looking at an API and understanding how it works as a core privacy skill set. This is also the rise of privacy engineering as a discipline. Connect. This is a successful approach and shows that they have fulfilled their commitment and have been on track for 10 years.

Photo by Filiberto Santilln of Unsplash

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