News that the Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Google €403 million for breaching data privacy rules around the processing of users’ location history and data may have been welcomed by watchdogs.
Although it is inevitable that Google will appeal at least some parts of the decision, the data protection authorities can, for now at least, chalk this one up as a win. Big Tech is being reined in, one decision at a time, and consumers’ privacy can only benefit from this.
But you’d be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about given the time lags involved in the case. The decision related to complaints made as far back as 2018. Google has already made several changes to how it processes user data, giving consumers greater control, for example, through auto deletion of certain information once a set period has expired.
The investigation itself began in 2020 – the year of the pandemic. So why the delay?
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The increasingly complex nature of some of these investigations is no doubt at play here. Specifically on the Google investigation, there were eight different organisations that made complaints to data protection authorities.
Then there was the standard back and forth between the parties. And eventually, there would have been other data protection authorities to consult before the final decision was published.
This case may have been one of the outliers, with many of the cases taken by the DPC now reaching a decision within two years of the investigation opening. The Government has already put more money into expanding the DPC. But with increasing caseloads and the number of complaints rising, the office may soon start to see a bottlenecks occurring.
As consumer organisation BEUC pointed out, late enforcement can be as harmful as no enforcement at all. If the Republic wants to be taken seriously as a regulator, the Government will have to show it. Or else we may once more see increasing wait times for fundamental rights to be upheld and criticisms from abroad on the how the system here works.
