The European Union (EU) cannot keep itself from overregulating the digital world. Last month, the European Commission (EC) published a proposal to compel Google Search to share data with competing digital services. “With this public consultation, we want to hear from the market on the most effective ways for Google to share search data with competing online search engine providers, to continue our push for innovation and fair competitiveness,” stated Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy. The EU seeks simultaneously to benefit consumers and to goose “competition,” but the two aims contradict one another. Google Search data, handed over to competitors, might prop up those competitors (which have, to date, failed to market digital services of Google Search’s quality). But enforced data sharing—whatever degree of ersatz competition it might bring—endangers consumers.

Data shared with Google’s competitors requires, in effect, that users’ search information—reflective of their private lives and thoughts—be littered across the internet, irrespective of the intentions of the recipients of those data. Google laid out the case starkly: “Hundreds of millions of Europeans trust Google with their ⁠most sensitive searches—including private questions about their health, family, and finances—and the Commission's proposal would force us to hand this data over to third parties, with dangerously ineffective privacy protections,” Clare Kelly, the company’s senior competition counsel, said in a statement. What, precisely, the median Google Search user expects the company to do with his search data cannot be determined in definite terms, but serial data-sharing would violate the trust implicit between platform and user.

The EC will endeavor to anonymize the data given over to Google Search’s competition. The technological facts of the internet, however, usually render online anonymity a fiction. When going online, users leave trails of data, like the dots in a connect-the-dots book. The dots can, in most cases, be connected, if only somebody attempts it. For example, a “key risk [of the EU’s Google Search scheme] involves correlating shared search data with external datasets,” reports CyberInsider. “Since the feed includes clicked URLs and interaction timing (albeit generalized), entities with access to website analytics or tracking scripts could potentially match search records with visitor logs.” On the internet, the fact that you are a dog may not be immediately visible, but a little sleuthing very often reveals the truth.