Google Accused Of GDPR Violations By Seven Countries With The Possibility Of Paying $4 Billion In Fine

Consumer groups in 7 European countries have just filed GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) complaints against the location tracking of Google.

According to the BEUC (European Consumer Organisation), an organization representing European consumer groups — Greece, Sweden, Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, and Slovenia, claims that deceptive practices of Google around the company’s location tracking do not give the users a valid option about whether to enable the service. And that the company does not inform them properly about what the location tracking service entails. These complaints can cause Google to pay a big sum of money.

These complaints, which the European consumer groups have filed to each of their data protection authority, come as a result of them discovering that the tech giant can track the location of its users even though they already turned off the Location History. If users want to prevent Google from its GPS tracking entirely, they have to turn off the “Web and App Activity,” which is by default enabled.

The BEUC accuses Google of using deceptive practices to get its users to enable both options, and users are not informed adequately about what these options can entail. Therefore, consent isn’t given freely.

Google responded to those complaints by saying that they set the Location History to be turned off by default, and the company makes it clear that disabling the option will not stop all the location tracking. Google claimed that the company’s intention is reading the report to see if that report has any information for it to take on board.

The search giant Google isn’t the first tech corporations to face major GDPR complaints. Earlier in the year, the data privacy commissioner of Ireland stated that it would investigate Facebook over the security breach that involved 29 million users’ account. As the new General Data Protection Regulation was into effect in May, violations of such regulation remain quite untested in the courts, so it is still unclear how strong of a case the 7 groups got. If they are successful, GDPR stated that the search giant might be fined of an amount up to 4 percent of global revenues of the company, which, based on its 2017 filings, can be more than $4 billion.