Google has recently been causing some waves with its privacy policies, and now a significant number of European countries are speaking up and letting everyone know they’ve had enough.  

In 2012, Google changed its policy allowing them to closely track those signed into one of their many tremendously popular applications.  Google then compiled and processed all this data in order to sell it to advertising companies. 

“We collect information to provide better services to all of our users – from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful or the people who matter most to you online.” — Google privacy policy

This past Wednesday, the CNIL, France’s online privacy watchdog, fined Google 150,000 euros ($204,000) for failing to respect the country’s privacy guidelines.  On top of that, Spain fined the search engine $1.2 million last month, and Germany, Italy, Britain and the Netherlands have all separately declared Google to be in violation of the law.

However, these fines hardly made a dent in Google’s reserves, as the company made $14.9 billion in just the 3rd quarter of last year.  That means that Google makes 204,000 dollars roughly every 2 minutes, including weekends and holidays.  Google paid off the fines without a fuss, because it simply doesn’t matter to them.  With that much influence and money, is it possible to really hold Google accountable for their actions?  A corporation this widespread and wealthy is almost unprecedented, so it remains unclear how this will affect online privacy in the long run.