Google gets another $460 million fine for misusing user data

Google hasn’t had a particularly rewarding 2026, and its legal troubles don’t seem to end. In July 2026, the European Court of Justice held that Google had violated its dominant position by pushing its own services and reserved its previous judgment in the landmark antitrust case, along with a penalty of $4.67 billion. Later that month, the European Commission fined Google close to $1 billion for allegedly violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA). While this was followed by some relief from previously suggested extreme measures in the United States vs. Google lawsuit regarding its monopoly in digital ads, Google has now been hit with another fine of close to half a billion dollars.

Google has now been fined €403 million ($462 million) by the Irish data privacy watchdog Data Protection Commission (DPC) for allegedly mishandling data related to users’ location history. The DPC, acting on behalf of the European Commission, said that Google infringed on the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by:

• misusing location data in Web & App Activity and Location History,
• failing to demonstrate fairness and transparency in its processing of personal data in Location Accuracy on Android, and
• unlawfully retaining location data in Web & App Activity and Location History.

The DPC noted that due to these practices, Google may have misused users’ location history to “influence them with ads or to infer their interests.” It further added, “the retention of users’ location data for longer than necessary aggravated this loss of control.”

The ruling culminated a six-year-old investigation that opened in February 2020 and tracked Google’s handling of user data since May 2018, when GDPR went into effect.

Google challenged the findings, saying the “case centered around historical policies” and that it had “significantly evolved ​its practices on managing location data since 2019,” as per a statement shared by Reuters.

Google added that, as part of mending its ways, it now allows consumers to delete their data automatically on a rolling basis and gives them control over whether their location data is used to serve ads.

Meanwhile, the DPC is still investigating Google’s monopoly in online advertising, data brokerage, and scraping user data to train AI, and is expected to deliver its judgment in these inquiries soon.