Google has been levied a €403 million ($463 million) fine for contravening the European Union’s stringent privacy regulations through its mishandling of users’ location data, the bloc’s data privacy watchdog announced Monday.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission announced that its investigation had determined that Google had neither lawfully nor fairly processed location data—whether in users’ Web & App Activity, a Google setting that tracks browsing and search history, or in their Location History, a service that maps, via their mobile phones, the places they have been.

Regulators further determined that the company had failed to satisfy the requirements of lawfulness, fairness and transparency in its processing of personal data within the Location Accuracy feature of the Android mobile operating system.

Ireland serves as Google's lead regulator across the 27-nation EU, a role occasioned by the circumstance that the U.S. tech giant's European headquarters is situated in Dublin.

The investigation, launched six years prior, scrutinised how Google had applied the EU privacy rule book — the General Data Protection Regulation — from its entry into force in 2018 until February 2020.

"This case centers around historical policies that have since been updated," Google said in a statement.

"From 2019 onwards, we've significantly evolved our practices and launched robust tools that render the management of location data effortless."

Regulators asserted that location data constitutes a category of personal data amassed by Google, which may be leveraged to infer an individual's whereabouts.

"Location data can confer both benefits and harms upon individuals," Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said.

"It can substantially augment the utility of online services, yet it can equally divulge a considerable trove of information about an individual, encompassing information that is inherently private."

It constitutes the fourth most substantial EU privacy fine ever levied by the Irish watchdog, which has on prior occasions imposed heftier penalties upon TikTok and Meta, among them a 1.2 billion euro fine against Meta.

The regulator averred that it continues to pursue three further privacy investigations pertaining to Google.