Google’s location tracking comes with a €403M fine
Google gets an expensive reminder that personal data is personal.
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- Ireland’s DPC fined Google €403 million for unlawfully processing users’ location data.
- The regulator said Google used Web & App Activity, Location History, and Location Accuracy in ways that breached GDPR.
- Google must bring its location data processing into compliance with European data law within six months.
- Google says the case concerns historical policies and plans to appeal the fine.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has slapped Google with a €403 million fine for unlawfully processing location data.
In February 2020, the Irish privacy and data protection regulator launched an inquiry into Google’s processing of location data following various complaints from European consumer rights organizations.
Google collected and processed location data through 3 separate features: Web & App Activity, Location History, and Location Accuracy.
Through Web & App Activity, Google tracks what users search for and do on Google services and apps. The company also collects location data through this feature, which is enabled by default.
Location History keeps track of users’ locations while they have their mobile device on them. It features a timeline users can use to see what places they have visited and what activities they have done. Unlike Web & App Activity, users have to opt in to use Location History.
Lastly, Location Accuracy is a feature on Android that enables the operating system to determine location more accurately.
The DPC found that Google infringed Europe’s privacy legislation through these features between May 2018, when the GDPR came into effect, and February 2020, when the privacy supervisor launched its investigation.
For this, Google has to pay a fine of €403 million. Furthermore, the tech company is ordered to bring its processing of location data into compliance with European data protection law within 6 months.
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“Location data can bring both benefits and harms to individuals. It can greatly enhance the utility of online services, but it can also reveal a significant amount of information about an individual, including information that is inherently private,” Graham Doyle, DPC Deputy Commissioner, said in a statement.
“As a result of Google’s failures in this regard, individuals could have been unaware that their location was being used to, for example, influence them with ads or to infer their interests, and could lose control over their personal data,” he continued.
Agustín Reyna, Director General of BEUC, said that the decision is good news for consumers, but regrets that it took so long to come to this conclusion.
“Google has tracked hundreds of millions of European consumers for years to find out as much as it can about them. Location data can be incredibly sensitive because it reveals a lot about our personal lives: where our children go to school, how many times someone visited a hospital, or even a place of prayer. This is incredibly invasive, violates fundamental rights to privacy and breaches the GDPR,” Reyna said.
A spokesperson for Google told Reuters that the case centered around historical policies, and that it had launched robust tools and significantly evolved its practices on managing location data since 2019.
Google intends to appeal the fine to “obtain greater legal clarity on a few specific points,” the spokesperson said when asked.
