Google was fined €403 million, about $462 million, by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which ruled that the way it processed location data between May 2018 and February 2020 was not lawful, fair or transparent enough under GDPR. The regulator said people using Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy may not have realised their whereabouts could feed targeted advertising and guesses about their interests, and that Google held on to the data longer than it needed to. Google has six months to fix the practices, and says the ruling covers policies it has already changed, pointing to controls it added from 2019, but it plans to appeal. It is the DPC’s fourth-largest fine, behind the €1.2 billion it hit Meta with in 2023.
