Google’s location data privacy failures draw a €403 million fine
Brief
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Google €403 million ($459 million) for violating European privacy law. The penalty follows a six-year inquiry into Google’s management of user location data between May 2018 and February 2020.
During that time, Google collected users’ location data without making clear that it could be used to infer their interests and shape the ads they saw.
Google’s location history keeps track of users’ locations when using their devices. It’s an opt-in service that includes a Timeline feature to display a private map of the places they’ve visited. A separate Android feature, Location Accuracy, helps devices determine their location more accurately than GPS alone.
Google had told users that they could stop Location History tracking by turning off that setting.