Google hit with €403m fine by Irish data watchdog over GDPR violations

He continued: "As a result of Google's failures... individuals could have been unaware that their location was being used to, for example, influence them with ads or to infer their interests, and could lose control over their personal data."The retention of users' location data for longer than necessary aggravated this loss of control."In addition to being fined, Google has also been ordered to bring its data processing into compliance within six months.How have Google responded?In a statement, Google said: "This case centres around historical policies that have since been updated. From 2019 onwards, we've significantly evolved our practices and launched robust tools that make managing location data simple."They also said they have made data protection improvements in recent years, including "industry-first auto-delete controls", which enables all users to "set your account to automatically delete your data on a rolling three, 18, or 36-month basis".Other measures to safeguard personal data have also been introduced, they said, such as "simple ads management", which allows you "to turn off personalized ads entirely", and "increased transparency", including "consolidated detailed information about our location data practices and account settings".