France and Google are playing a delicate game of brinkmanship in the courts of Europe, and it still isn’t clear who’ll come off worse. France fined the search company €150,000 ($200,000) last month as a penalty for failing to tell French citizens exactly what happens to their personal data. Google could have coughed up the trivial sum and drowned its sorrows in a bottle of beaujolais, but instead it has decided to fight — not because of the money, but because accepting the fine would have also involved making a public admission of guilt (published below the search button in a size 13 font, no less) and the company feels this would have “irreparably damaged” its reputation. Google’s legal appeal against the fine appears to rest on creating a rift between France and the European Union, because it claims its privacy policy meets EU requirements and shouldn’t have to be amended to suit one European country.
Read the full story at Engadget, or read the original report at The Wall Street Journal (paywall).