Europe’s push to rein in Big Tech is ramping up, with the European Commission planning to announce new regulations for Google next month. The rules could see Google forced to play nicer with its EU competitors, but the company has some concerns. Google is framing this not as a manifestation of its anticompetitive bent, but as genuine concern for user privacy.
Heather Adkins, Google’s VP of security engineering, told Wired that the EU’s proposals could lead to serious security and privacy issues. The potential changes come in two forms. First, regulators want Gemini dethroned as the sole integrated AI service on Android. This would mean letting users integrate other AI models and give them Gemini-like system access. Separately, the EU wants Google to share anonymized search data with other companies.
“If implemented as described today, I think within a short period of time on Android, we’d see a significant increase in fraud in the EU,” said Adkins, who noted these events could happen within weeks of pushing through the changes.
Gemini’s special status on Android devices gives it access to user files, screen content, and enhanced voice interactions. Adkins doesn’t go into much detail here, but the implication seems to be that bad actors would leverage these new options to install malicious AI services that could steal data and manipulate the user experience.
Google has more detailed concerns with the anonymized data sharing. According to the draft of the European Commission’s proposal, Google would have to provide anonymized search data to competitors that is similar to what Google sees internally. That could include the content of searches, ranking, and click rates. This data is core to Google’s search product and has not been provided at this level of granularity before.