Google fined €403 million over location data
Photo: Google was fined 403 million euros (unsplash.com)
An Irish regulator fined Google for four violations related to the handling of user geolocation data—one of the largest fines in the agency's history, according to Politico.
Why Google was penalized
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Google 403 million euros for violating the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This is the fourth-largest fine ever imposed by the Irish regulator and the first major penalty specifically for Google. Ireland is responsible for overseeing many global tech companies whose European offices are located in the country.
Commissioners Des Hogan, Dale Sunderland, and Niamh Sweeney explained that the violations concerned how Google processed and stored user location data in its Web & App Activity, Location History, and Location Accuracy features, as well as the transparency of these processes.
The DPC launched its investigation back in 2020 following complaints from consumer organizations in various European Union countries.
The organizations claimed that Google used dark patterns and deceptive practices to coerce people into enabling features that transmitted their geolocation data.
Google's response
"This case centers around historical policies that have since been updated. From 2019 onward, we've significantly evolved our practices and launched robust tools that make managing location data simple," says Google spokesperson Mathilde Méchin.
Ireland's DPC is conducting three other large-scale investigations into the company. They concern the processing of artificial intelligence data by the PaLM2 model, Google's personalized advertising system, and the company's account registration process.
Meanwhile, researchers noted that artificial intelligence began to invent its own language while communicating with one another.
After a few days of work on the Emergence project, the algorithms created new words and metaphors whose meanings even experts could not decipher right away.
Google has also reached an agreement with the UN to create a new statistical database designed to help neural networks provide more accurate answers.
The decision came after testing showed that popular chatbots provided the correct figure in less than a quarter of cases.
