Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Google €403 million (about US$462 million) on 21 September, closing an inquiry opened in February 2020 into how the company processed location data, and ordered the company to bring its processing into compliance within six months. The investigation examined three services and features — web and app activity, location history and location accuracy — across the period from May 2018, when the GDPR took effect, to February 2020, and considered whether the processing was lawful and fair and whether Google met the regulation's transparency and accountability requirements, including its retention of location data in those features. This is the first time the DPC, which acts as Google's lead supervisory authority because the company's European headquarters are in Dublin, has fined the platform, though the same regulator has levied repeated multi-hundred-million-euro penalties on Meta and TikTok. Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle framed the finding around the sensitivity of the data class: location data can disclose where a person is and "a significant amount of information about an individual, including information that is inherently private". It is not established from the decision whether Google still processes any of the practices examined, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

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