Mashable: According to the ruling, Google misled certain consumers about what it did with the location data it gathered from their Android phones between January 2017 and December 2018.

Google was fined A$60 million (roughly $42.7 million) by the Federal Court of Australia on Friday, the country's competition authority said. The fine was imposed for the company's deceptive practices in collecting users' location data.

According to the ruling, Google misled certain consumers about what it did with the location data it gathered from their Android phones between January 2017 and December 2018.

According to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), Google misled users into thinking that the "location history" setting on their Android phones was the only way in which it could collect location data, when in fact, a feature to monitor web and applications activity also allowed local data collection and storage.

According to the regulator, as many as 1.3 million Google customers in Australia might have been harmed by the action taken against the corporation and its local subsidiary in October 2019.

The authority said that Google has taken corrective action in 2018. Google announced the resolution in an email message and emphasized the ease with which users can now control and comprehend their location data.

Over the last year, the government of Australia has been debating and ultimately passing a bill that would require Google and Meta's Facebook to pay media firms for material on its platforms. This has resulted in legal action against the search engine.