Google Slammed with €403m Fine for Location Data Practices

The Irish Data Protection Commission has fined Google €403 million for its handling of location data. The fine relates to practices between May 2018 and February 2020, where Google collected location information even when users had disabled location history.

Consumer associations had flagged this behavior as early as 2018, pointing out that Google's location tracking was enabled by default, and that the company used misleading prompts to encourage users to enable it. The regulator found that this processing did not meet the requirements of lawfulness, fairness, and transparency under GDPR.

The commission also looked into Google's 'Location Accuracy' feature, which is accessible even without a Google account. It was unable to demonstrate that this feature met the necessary requirements for processing personal data.