Italy’s competition authority has settled a probe of Google focused on data portability after accepting commitments from the tech giant that look set to make it easier for users to take their data elsewhere, the AGCM said today.

The watchdog opened the investigation last summer, acting on a complaint by a local company which operates a direct marketing platform, called Weople. Its owner, Hoda, had complained Google’s data portability offer — aka Takeout — is extremely complicated and discourages users from porting their data elsewhere.

The Italian company has a commercial reason to want to smooth the path of data portability since the Weople service works by encouraging users to port data from third parties, such as social media platforms and loyalty card schemes, in order to populate so-called virtual data deposit boxes.

Per an explainer on its website, data deposited in virtual spaces on the Weople platform is encrypted and tokenized — a process Hoda claims renders personal data “anonymized” and “aggregated” — in order that it can be repurposed for targeted marketing, including the sending of personalized offers, without users’ personal data or identity being shared with advertisers. So Hoda is purporting to act as an identity-screening intermediary, albeit while processing user data itself.The carrot offered to users to encourage them to share a copy of their data is a promise that they’ll get cut in on any ad revenue. The FAQ suggests up to 90% of any revenue generated off the data is returned to users in passive earnings.

Given the dominant role Google plays in several online market, such as the market for general search, access to data it holds on users was seen by Hoda as important for the development of its business.

Back in 2019 it started by asking Google to improve interoperability mechanisms to make it easier for users to port their data into its platform. But its complaint to the AGCM said the tech giant rebuffed its asks — pointing to its existing Takeout procedure as the only available route for porting data. Hence Hoda filing a formal complaint with the watchdog that Google was obstructing interoperability.

The regulatory oversight has now culminated in the AGCM accepting proposals from Google aimed at easing data portability.