Ireland fines Google €403m over location data. Will it appeal like Meta and TikTok?
Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Google €403m on 21 September over how it used people's location data, and gave it six months to comply.
What happened
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Google €403m on over its processing of location data in Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy, and ordered it to comply with the GDPR within six months.
Google must fix how it uses location data within six months. The Data Protection Commission, which leads EU privacy enforcement for Google, found that Google broke EU data law in how it collected, explained and kept location data between and . The inquiry began in after complaints by consumer groups led by BEUC.
Google said the case was about old policies that it had changed since 2019. It did not say whether it would appeal. The Guardian reported that this is the regulator’s fourth-largest fine, and that three other large inquiries into Google are at an advanced stage.
Google has 28 days from notice of the decision to appeal. Under section 142 of Ireland’s Data Protection Act 2018, a company can appeal a fine to the High Court within that time. If it does not, the regulator asks a court to confirm the fine.
Since a ruling of the EU Court of Justice on , companies can also challenge rulings of the EU data protection board directly in the EU courts.
Sources: The Guardian, Data Protection Commission, Data Protection Act 2018, revised, Politico
The Pattern
Almost every big tech company fined by Ireland went to court. We looked at fines the Irish Data Protection Commission gave big tech companies under the GDPR, the EU data law, and checked whether the company went to court within 31 days. Where only the formal appeal is on record, we count it, because the law allows 28 days from notice. Of 13 such fines, 11 went to court. The ten shown are the ones closest to the Google case, and in all ten the company went to court. One regulator made every decision, and Meta or WhatsApp is the company in seven of the ten, so these are not ten separate choices. The EU court ruling of came after all of them and adds a route to court that none of them had.
Show the other 8 cases
The Read
History is one-sided. In each of the ten closest cases, from WhatsApp’s €225m fine in 2021 to TikTok’s €530m fine in 2025, the company went to court. LinkedIn, the only one with a filing date from the regulator, appealed 25 days after its fine was announced. The two fines in the full record that were paid without a fight, Twitter’s €450,000 and Meta’s €17m, were small and did not order any change to how the company worked. Google’s fine is large and comes with a six-month order.
The weak spots are in who made the choices. Seven of the ten appeals came from the Meta group, which follows one legal policy, and one regulator made all ten decisions. Google itself has taken a GDPR fine to court before, in France in 2019, and lost in 2020, but the Irish regulator has never fined it before.
A Google statement that it accepts the decision, or news that it has paid, would make an appeal less likely. A court listing would settle it.
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