“The Bundeskartellamt has reached the preliminary conclusion that, based on the current terms, users are not given sufficient choice as to whether and to what extent they agree to this far-reaching processing of their data across services.The company has to give users sufficient choice as to how their data are processed.” Google will now have an opportunity to comment on the FCO’s objections, as its administrative proceeding continues — and the tech giant could either try to justify its practices to the regulator or offer suggested remedies to alleviate its concerns (as it did to seek to settle an FCO probe of its News Showcase product last year).(Reminder: Three years ago, Google announced a plan to deprecate support for third party tracking technologies in its Chrome browser and switch to (it claims) more privacy-preserving alternatives for ad targeting (aka its “Privacy Sandbox” proposal).And while any FCO order to Google that reduced its ability to join up usage across different services would only apply to its business in Germany, the European Union now has a similar ex ante update to competition regulation — in the form of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — which could end up applying (broader) obligations and/or restrictions on how Google processes data right across the bloc.That work will take place in the coming months — and Google is widely expected to be subject to the pan-EU special abuse regime — although it remains to be seen which of its services may be designated as core platform services under the DMA."