Google Got a €403M Irish Fine for Tracking Phones After Users Thought Location Was Off

Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Google €403 million on Monday for the way it handled the location data behind its ad targeting, ruling that people were tracked without really understanding what they had agreed to.

The complaints go back years. Seven European consumer groups argued that Google followed users' every move, and that location trails can expose intimate details: a place of worship, a hospital visit, a political demonstration, a particular bar. The Norwegian consumer agency's 2018 research, which anchored the European Consumer Organisation's case, said Google used "various tricks" to keep location history and web and app activity switched on.

The regulator agreed that users could have been left in the dark. People "could have been unaware that their location was being used to, for example, influence them with ads or to infer their interests," deputy commissioner Graham Doyle said, adding that holding onto the data longer than needed made the loss of control worse.

The inquiry examined "web and app activity," "location history," and "location accuracy" between 25 May 2018 and 4 February 2020. Alongside the €403 million penalty, the DPC gave Google six months to bring its processing in line with the EU's GDPR.

One detail sits uncomfortably beside the win: the case took six years. Agustín Reyna, director general of BEUC, welcomed the ruling but called the time it took "disproportionate with the seriousness of the infringement," warning that "late enforcement can be as harmful as no enforcement at all."

Google frames it as old news. "This case centres around historical policies that have since been updated," a spokesperson said, pointing to tools launched from 2019 that let people manage their location data.

It is the fourth-largest fine the Irish DPC has issued, behind Meta's €1.2bn, TikTok's €530m, and Instagram's €405m, and it lands on a company already fighting Brussels over how it runs ads. The location ruling is separate from Google's adtech antitrust remedies fight, but both turn on how much of the ad machine regulators can actually reach. Three other large-scale DPC inquiries into Google remain open, all described as being at an advanced stage.