Google has become the first US tech giant to be fined under the EU’s new privacy rules, after it was slapped with a €50m penalty for failing to be transparent about how it uses data and not having a legal basis for personalising ads.
France’s data protection office, CNIL, found the US search engine guilty of breaking the General Data Protection Regulation on Monday in a decision that will heighten concerns among other tech companies, data brokers, credit reference agencies and advertising groups facing similar complaints under GDPR.
The regulator said Google’s users are not able to fully understand how the company uses data because its disclosures are too “generic and vague” and spread across lots of different screens and documents.