The commission’s Sanctions Committee issued a €150,000 fine, saying that Google’s privacy policy – which was implemented in March 2012 as a way of unifying the privacy policies of 60 of its services – “does not sufficiently inform its users of the conditions in which their personal data are processed, nor of the purposes of this processing”.

CNIL claims that because of this lack of clarity, users of Google services “are not able to exercise their rights, in particular their right of access, objection or deletion”.

The fine is the highest ever issued by CNIL, while its conclusions are similar to those put forward by Dutch and Spanish data protection authorities last year in their own criticisms of Google’s privacy policy. The Spanish authorities also fined Google €900,000.